when the idea first entered my head that my parents might be tiresome to other people.
Averil pouted at being left behind, but the will-reading was for immediate family only. I paused at my parents’ Volvo, while Truman lurched to the driver’s seat. I’ll drive if you like, I offered, and he said no that’s all right and I clued that he always drove, never mind that this car now was a third mine. I sensed a burgeoning attitude problem.
“Can we agree to ditch Mordecai after the meeting?” Truman proposed at the wheel.
“We might have dinner. He’s your only brother, he lives a mile away from you, and you’ve seen him twice in two years. For funerals.”
“He’s a bore and a know-it-all and he ignores me. He never fails to make some snide crack about my being in school, and then we have to listen for hours about the future of digital recording.”
I would happily describe my brothers’ relationship to each other, except that they don’t have one.
“A single evening won’t kill you.” That was that. With Truman, I am sufficiently accustomed to having my way that I don’t even notice when I get it.
We parked on Hillsborough, a leafy and majestic street in summer, T-junctioning into the state capitol, but looking the worse for wear with dogwoods and black walnuts too bare to obscure the failing businesses behind them. Downtown Raleigh was crumbling and dispirited, though like my parents’ kitchen I was glad it had not been done up. Several tower blocks broke the skyline, but for the most part Raleigh’s architecture had stayed low-lying, and Hillsborough was still lined with pipe shops, diners serving grits and black-eyed gravy, and the flagging Char-coal Grill. The rest of this town had multiplied threefold since I’d lived here, its perimeters bleeding to Durham and Chapel Hill, so it was comforting to find a stretch like this one that hadn’t changed much.
There was one more bit of landscape that hadn’t changed much.
I had to smile. Two blocks down, in silhouette he might be mistaken for my father, with that distinctive side-to-side swagger and ground-eating galumph. But my father’s purposeful headlong look would have aimed at the NC Supreme Court around the corner; Mordecai leaned toward a different sort of bar.
As he drew a few strides closer, the paternal resemblance fell away. For one thing, he’s shorter; both my brothers battled the metaphorical notion that they had not risen to their father’s stature in any respect. While my father’s umber hair had shocked in a Kennedy-style wave and was cropped close at the neck, Mordecai hadn’t cut his hair since he was twelve; he bound the waist-long locks into three tight pigtails. His coloring was my mother’s: when unbraided, the hair was lush and dark; his brows were rich and low, his lips full. If he weren’t always vulturing his forehead and crinkling his mouth into an anal scowl, his face would look pretty.
The sun out, Mordecai was wincing, the cast of his skin a sallower shade than the wan winter light. While my mother’s tones were olive, all of Mordecai was yellow, down to his thick rimless glasses whose lenses he special-ordered with a urinous tint. The unhealthy jaundice of his complexion was, I knew, distilled from liquor and heavy food and a vampire’s schedule of hibernating all day and working all night. As he cringed down the poppled pavement, I doubted Mordecai’s nocturnal flesh had seen more than a few rays of sunshine for twenty-five years. That may have left him safe from skin cancer, though if so that would be the single disease to which he had failed to issue a personalized invitation.
I raised my hand in salute, but not too high, lest Truman see me as eager.
When my big brother grinned back, his teeth matched his skin. At fifteen he’d declared that for his two live-in girlfriends he wanted to “taste like himself” and refused to brush. The plaque build-up had been sticky and flaxen, and though he now seemed to conform to ordinary standards of hygiene his lopsided smirk remained ocherous.
“How’s tricks, Corrie Lou?” Mordecai was the only living person who could employ my childhood’s atrocious double-name without my taking his head off.
“Yo, Mortify.”
He kissed me on the forehead; his lips were soft. I caught a tinge of alcohol on his breath. He grazed my temple with his right hand, whose first two fingertips were lutescent with tobacco, the nails saffron and curling. Though Mordecai was only thirty-eight, his hands, creased with wood stain and machine oil, crosshatched with scars from the carelessness of hirelings, were those of a much older man.
“True.” Mordecai granted his brother a perfunctory nod; Truman grunted.
“You lucked out with parking,” I chattered. “That army truck must take up at least two metres.”
Hee-hee, went Mordecai—his laughter, too, was prematurely aged, geezery and good-old-boy, from slumming with Tarheel construction workers who dropped out of high school. “Nope. Yellow lines all the way. Remember that Justice Department card Father kept on the dashboard of the Volvo? After his funeral, I swiped it.”
“I wondered what happened to that,” Truman muttered.
“I find that hard to credit,” I said. “The cops believing an army surplus troop transporter belongs to the Supreme Court.”
“Hey, it’s worked so far. Not a ticket for two years. Figured True here wouldn’t use it. That wouldn’t be right. That would be lying.”
The pavement was too narrow for the three of us to proceed abreast. I didn’t feel comfortable coupling clearly with one brother over the other, so trailed a bit behind the elder and a bit before the younger, our trio cutting a diagonal of birth-order down the walk.
“Man, I hope this Garrison character can shuffle paper fast.” Mordecai rubbed his hands. “I could sure use the cash.”
Truman rolled his eyes.
Hugh Garrison’s office was pastel and travel-postery, with a round table and straight-backs next to his desk. I was obscurely disappointed; in my imagination, we’d be seated at a long darkwood conference table, with portraits on the walls, emerald bankers’ lamps and heavy crimson drapes. I’d read too many murder mysteries.
Hugh shook hands and offered condolences about my mother. When he invited us to the table, Mordecai and Truman found themselves next to each other; Truman fussed with his pea coat and managed to insert me between them. “So what,” I said, “you read the will aloud to us?”
“Not unless you insist,” said Hugh, spreading over his chair and hiking his pants so the hairs above his socks showed. He was a rangy, casual man with a no-nonsense air. “I think I can give ya’ll the gist without the being-of-sound-mind-and-body nonsense.
“Now,” he began, spreading papers before him. “I guess your parents told you that their estate would be divided equally between the three kids. So I assume they also apprised you guys of their bequest to the ACLU?”
He must have looked up to find a wave of shock registering across all three faces.
“It’s thanks to the ACLU,” Truman grumbled, “that we never had a clean sponge.”
“Rubbish,” I said, recovering. “We’d have had a putrid sponge if they hadn’t donated a dime. A smelly sponge is a point of view.”
“All I know is that to Father,” said Truman,
