Chapter 5: The Other End of the Swing
She slept in Dad’s old room.
I didn’t plan it. I just heard myself say, “Come inside,” and then I was carrying the laundry basket of throw pillows up the steps while Officer Delgado wrote down my statement on the hood of her car.
Travis was charged with criminal trespass and criminal mischief for the lock. Renee told me the prosecutor would ask what I wanted. I said I wanted him to pay for the lock and stay away from my house until I said otherwise. I didn’t want him to have a record that would follow his baby into kindergarten. They offered him a diversion program. He took it.
Kayla stayed nine days. She was easy to have around. She folded towels in thirds, the way my mother did, and she cried once in the shower where she thought I couldn’t hear. On the fourth night, at the kitchen table, she asked me the question I’d been asking myself.
“Why didn’t you just tell him? At the start. On Sunday.” She didn’t say it meanly. “If you’d said I bought it from the bank, he’d have been mad, but he wouldn’t have been in handcuffs.”
I thought about lying. I didn’t.
“Because if I told him I bought it, he’d ask why it was for sale. And then I’d have to tell him Dad lost it paying off his debts.” I turned my mug around on the table. “Dad made me promise. I think I kept it a week too long.”
Kayla was quiet for a long time.
“He’d still have done it,” she said finally. “The locksmith. He’d already booked him.”
Maybe. I’ll never know. Some people say I set my brother up. Some people say he set himself up. Most days I think we’re both right.
Kayla’s sister drove up from Columbus on a Sunday and took her and the trailer away. Travis moved into a friend’s basement. For three weeks, I heard nothing.
Then, on a Saturday morning in December, his truck pulled into my driveway without a trailer.
He didn’t come up the steps. He stood at the bottom of them, the way he had in October, in the same black vest. He looked smaller.
“Diversion makes you write a letter,” he said. “To the victim.” He held up a folded piece of notebook paper. “I’m supposed to mail it. I figured I’d just bring it.”
I went inside. I came back out with the plastic bin from the basement and set it on the porch.
“Before you give me that,” I said, “you should read this.”
I showed him page fourteen.
He read it standing at the bottom of the steps. I watched him get to the name on the account. I watched his mouth open and then close. He sat down on the second step like his knees had been kicked.
“He never told me,” he said. “He said the bank forgave it. He said, Don’t worry about it, son.“
“I know.”
“He lost the house. For me.” He put his face in his hands. “And you bought it back.”
“Somebody had to.”
We stayed like that for a while. Mr. Brandt rolled his trash cans to the curb across the street, very slowly, not looking at us.
Then I picked up my mug and sat down on the porch swing Dad built in 1991. The chain creaked the way it always has.
I didn’t give Travis a key. I don’t know if I ever will.
But I went in and poured him a cup of coffee, and when I came back out, I held it out toward the other end of the swing.
After a long minute, he came up the steps and took it.
