Real Life by Kitty Burns Florey Page B

wiped her eyes. Later that day she telephoned Rose, and then she vacuumed Phinny’s old room and put clean sheets on the bed and went out to Child World and bought a Parcheesi game, a jigsaw-puzzle map of the world, an illustrated Treasure Island , and a book called Encyclopedia Brown Saves the Day .
    Dorrie tried to imagine little Hugo moving into her parents’ lives. She could think of him as nothing but a small Phinny, trailing trouble wherever he went. As for Phinny himself, she knew she mourned, and that the hard knot in her stomach that was partly carsickness and tension was also partly grief for her brother, for “the waste of human life,” as her mother had been calling it all week. But her feelings were complicated. Had she not, all her life, prayed to be delivered from Phinny in some miraculous, unspecific way? And now he was dead in prison. She had been startled, at the memorial service, by the slap of memories she didn’t know she retained. Of the time when, age five, he had fallen out of a tree, a fragile apple tree he was forbidden to climb, and had lain there like a doll, limp and white, in a pile of autumn leaves. Dorrie had run to the back door, pursued by loss, screaming that he was dead, that they had to save him. (He’d had a mild concussion and a broken collarbone.) And another time, the first time she had ever seen him high, she’d come home from college for a weekend and he had met her at the train station, his eyes glittering and his walk uneven; his driving down the dark roads from New London she couldn’t recall without a lunge of fear. “What have you been doing to yourself, Phinny?” she had asked him—her brother, a junior in high school. He had told her to fuck off, and after that she’d imagined him in car crashes—not dying but, after a hospital stay, repenting.
    â€œWhat about a bicycle?” her mother said. “Do you suppose he’ll have one to bring? I don’t know how we’d ever get it in the car.”
    â€œIt would be simplest to get him a new one, Anna. I don’t suppose he’s got anything better than an old broken-down thing at Rose’s.”
    â€œWhat a lovely idea, Martin! We’ll get him a new one. Something classic—bright red, with a good big basket.”
    It struck Dorrie that they were like lottery winners spending their new wealth: Oh, yes, we’ll have that, and that, and one of those.… Their affection for Hugo, so long unrewarded, was their winnings, and they were spending it prodigally. Their reckless high spirits were obvious even from the backs of their heads—her mother’s passé French twist, her father’s shiny bald spot. They gleamed, and their voices rang sharp and metallic in the closed car, always on the edge of pleased laughter.
    â€œI’ll get that old sled out of the cellar and spiff it up a little.…”
    â€œLet’s call Chuck Thurman about putting the house on the market.…”
    â€œThat nice carved chess set must be in the attic.…”
    Rose lived outside Worcester, on a country road lined with sagging trailers and junked cars and sparse weeds. Martin and Anna had met Rose only once, years ago, when she and Phinny had brought Hugo for a visit, two stilted hours with Phinny’s bad temper and Hugo’s whining. Of Rose they recalled gross obesity, a rich and frequent laugh, and what seemed to be a sincere appreciation of their flower beds: Rose down on her knees crooning over the pansies. “It was unbelievable how she resembled Iris,” Anna said in the car. “It’s grotesque. But she seems a good woman, in spite of everything.” The four illegitimate children, she meant. The fat. The bad grammar.
    â€œWe have no reason to believe she hasn’t been good to Hugo,” Martin put in, eager to be fair but determined to let no hitch prevent their taking Hugo away. Rose had sounded cooperative on