I limp when it rains and I cannot run more than three miles and I was medically reclassified, which ended the career I had planned, and I want to be precise: the delay didn’t cost me my leg.
It cost me about fifteen percent of it, permanently, and that fifteen percent is the difference between the job I had and the job I have.
Theo moved onto my couch that month.
I did not tell him about the ticket for nine days.
I have apologized for that twice and he has told me both times to stop.
What I did instead, on day two, was drive him to the pawn shop on Delmar with four hundred dollars of his own money in an envelope and buy back our grandfather’s tools, which had not sold because — the owner told us, embarrassed — “nobody wants an old man’s Snap-ons anymore, they want the ones with the app.”
Theo cried in the parking lot with a socket set on his knees.
He was twenty.
“I didn’t think I’d ever see them again.”
“Theo.”
“What?”
“I need you to listen to me and I need you to not argue.
Grandpa left you nineteen percent of a company.”
He looked at me like I had spoken a different language.
“Of what?”
“The yard.
Grandpa’s yard.
It’s still running.
It made a hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars in distributions in April.”
“Imara, I fix transmissions in a garage in Fairhaven.”
“I know.”
“They pay me eighteen dollars an hour.”
“I know, Theo.”
And my little brother sat in a parking lot with a box of tools he had sold to pay for his sister’s knee and said, “Does Danica know?”
That is the question I could not answer for four months.
The pressure came the following week.
From my mother.
“Imara.
Your father says a law firm called.”
“Which one?”
“Don’t be smart with me.
What have you done?”
“I asked about Grandpa’s will.”
Silence, eleven seconds long.
“That was handled a long time ago.”
“By who, Mom?”
“Your father took care of all of that while you were off playing soldier.”
Playing soldier.
Eight years.
“Mom.
Did you sign my name on a shareholder consent?”
And my mother — I have gone over this a thousand times and this is exactly what she said — did not say no.
She said: “You weren’t here.”
That’s the whole family in three words.
