The Messenger of Magnolia Street by River Jordan Page A

the kitchen table, angles them sideways so as not to kick his brother.
    â€œYou know you’re not gonna get out of that meeting this morning.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œYou know she knows you’re here now, and she will come looking for you.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œIf you are gonna let it fall that way, just let me know, ’cause I don’t want to be here.”
    â€œYou want to ride with me down there?”
    â€œNope.”
    â€œI figured as much.”
    Nehemiah rises from the table like a man wearing a noose. The fact is, he loves his aunt Kate with all his heart. The fact is, his heart jumped a little out of sheer gladness when she elbowed her big way into that seat. Fact is, a tiny part of him wanted to put his head over on that big shoulder like he did when he was five, and fifteen, and might just do when he is fifty if she lives to be eighty.
    â€œSo you going on down there?”
    â€œGuess I am.”
    Billy is chuckling under his breath. “Oh, and Nehemiah, I don’t know, it’s up to you, but,” he rests his hands on the back of the kitchen chair, looking down, then back up at Nehemiah, “I imagine you got a bag with some more clothes in it, but just in case you need ’em, your other clothes are still hanging in your closet.” He pauses and the brothers just look at one another for a while, Nehemiah not exactly knowing how to process this information. “I hadn’t changed anybody’s anything. You know, just in case somebody came walking back through the door one day.”
    Nehemiah understands the just in case scenarios that Billy isn’t saying. It’s the just in case Nehemiah gave up on a different life. The just in case their mother resumed hers. Came walking up the front porch steps, her black purse on her arm, calling out, “What are you boys up to?”
    Nehemiah got his dimple from his mother, but his is on the opposite side. They smiled at one another like a mirror image. And then smiled even wider.
    â€œI appreciate it” is all Nehemiah says.
    Then I wait to see what will happen next.
    â€œWell, I’ll just see you later. Me and Sonny Boy’s got things to do.” Billy says, and heads outside to his truck, calling to Sonny, saying, “You want to take a ride, boy?”
    And Nehemiah is left alone in a quiet house with the memories rising up from the floorboards, wrapping around his ankles, beginning to hold him fast to the ground. He goes back to the door to his room, the one he had lived in every remembered day of his life in Shibboleth. And now, he stands before the door as if it’s a vortex, as if when he turns that knob, he will have to say good-bye to any future he had imagined because he will not be able to get back across the threshold. Nehemiah is forgetting that the power of choice is just that. And the making of it is all his.
    He turns the knob, opens the door, fights the urge to close his eyes. But there is no blinding flash. No irreversible line crossed. There is just the exact same old space. Exactly the way he left it. Exactly the way that he stood, surveyed the room, repositioned that picture on the dresser one last time, thought about taking it, and for reasons he still doesn’t understand, left it sitting there. It’s the one taken of him and Trice and Billy. When they were seventeen, sixteen, and nineteen and in that order to be exact. Their faces are still water wet, smiling, hair dripping aroundtheir faces. Trice is standing between the two of them, her arms hooked inside their elbows. It had been a perfect picture. Somehow capturing all their summers. All the green, and the wildness, and the freedom. But then, to capture it fully, you have to have Billy’s fingers behind Trice’s head because that’s the way it was. And you’d have to see what you can’t. The fact that Trice was pinching the inside of Billy’s forearm—hard. And