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“Never play in a strip club on acid,” he says. “It’s too freaky, man. It’ll break your heart. No, man, strip joints are the saddest places on earth.”

I don’t hardly know what to make of it, but Bobby rocks back on his heels, smiles, his eyes nearly closed, and in almost a whisper, says, “Not quite the saddest, dude. Not quite the saddest.”

Then the captain’s off in a different direction. “You should’ve seen my brother at sixteen,” he says. “He was pure. You ever been to the Rocky Mountains? No? Well, they have these streams up there, never been touched by a speck of pollution. That’s how my brother Kyle was back when we were growing up right here in this town.”

Bobby sits on the ground and leans back on his elbows. “I’d like to meet him. He sounds like a good dude.”

“Yeah.” The captain’s voice goes soft. “I wish you could, man. I wish you could. I taught him how to play guitar, but he was the real musician. His fingers flew up and down the fret board. He knew almost all the Beatles’ stuff. We were going to California together. I would’ve probably ended up backing him on bass. He would’ve been the front man, the singer. Sixteen years old and he had a voice like Howling Wolf. He read the Romantic poets and wrote lyrics no one could touch, except maybe Dylan.”

“What happened?” Bobby asks. “Why didn’t he keep playing?”

“He turned eighteen,” the captain says. “That’s what happened. He turned eighteen.”

I’m like, “What’s so bad about eighteen?”

The captain stops working and stares at the bumper of the truck. “The draft,” he says, rubbing his fingers through his beard. “The goddamn draft—that’s what’s bad about turning eighteen.”

“Vietnam?” asks Bobby.

“Yeah, Vietnam.” The word seems to put a dark spell on the captain. “I tried to go down and tell them to take me instead, but they wouldn’t do it. It was against their rules. So I said I’d sign up and that way they could put me and Kyle in the same unit together, but they wouldn’t take me. My brain was too out of whack.” He taps the side of his head. “Isn’t that ridiculous? They’ll drop you off crazy when they’ve got their good out of you, but they won’t let you in that way.”

“I hear that,” Bobby says.

“Yeah.” The captain nods. “And then I was home right here at this house the day those soldiers walked up to the front door in their perfect uniforms and brought the news that Kyle didn’t make it. Sniper fire.”

He goes quiet then, and we all sit there in silence, kind of like we’re at a funeral. Mr. White looks at me like, See, I told you there was more to the captain than you thought. And I have to admit he’s right. It’s weird. Somehow I’d never thought of the captain having a kid brother he loved. I don’t know what I would’ve done if Bobby hadn’t come home from Iraq. Maybe I’d go crazy too.

When the silence has lasted long enough, the captain picks up his mallet to go back to work on the bumper. “And that’s when I took off for California,” he says. “No way I could stay around here anymore. But now I’m back and I see Kyle in everything, man, in the grass blades and the streams and the
brick buildings downtown. He’s everywhere.” He looks at Bobby. “He’s even in you.”

Bobby nods. “Thanks. That’s a real compliment.”

As the captain works, it hits me he’s working on more than just the truck. The same with the sculptures. It’s like he’s trying, over and over, to fix something that went wrong a long time ago.

By the time he gets the grille pounded into decent shape, Bobby is barely awake, even though it’s still light out. The plan is for me to drive him back to Chuck’s in the pickup—we both figure it’s not a good idea for Mom and Dad to see him like this—and for Brianna to follow us, so she can drive me home to face the parental interrogation about where we’ve been and why we didn’t come home for dinner.

I help Bobby up, but he’s so unsteady on his feet, Mr. White has to help me get him to the truck. After he’s safely tucked into the passenger side, I turn around and Mr. White is standing right in front of me, maybe a foot away. “So,” he says, “you see what I mean about the captain? He loved his brother just like you love yours.”

“Yeah, maybe he’s not completely bad. He’s still a lunatic, though.”

Mr. White scratches his cheek. He seems a little nervous. “I was thinking, maybe I should give you my phone number in case you want to talk sometime, you know, about your brother and everything.”

“Your phone number?”

“Yeah, you know? The number for those little things people hold in their hands and use to talk to each other?”

I don’t have much—or any—practice with guys wanting to give me their phone numbers, so it’s not like I have an excuse
prepared for turning him down. I’m just like, “Sure, yeah, okay.” What else am I going to say—“No, you’re too frigging weird”?

The awkwardness continues. Neither one of us has a pen, so I have to dig one out of Chuck’s glove compartment. But now there’s nothing to write on, so Mr. White goes, “Hold out your arm.”

“What?”

“Hold out your arm.”

He grips my wrist with one hand and writes his number on my forearm with the other. I look past him to make sure Brianna isn’t watching. Luckily, she isn’t.

“You can call me anytime,” he says.

“Uh, yeah, sure,” I tell him, and walk around and climb into the pickup. I tell myself that when we get Bobby to Chuck’s apartment, I’ll wash it off, but for some reason I don’t. And the funny thing is, as I’m riding home with Brianna, I keep my arm turned so she can’t see it, but I can feel it there on my skin, practically like it’s glowing.

Almost as soon as I open the front door, the parents are all over me.

“Where were you?”

“Why didn’t you call?”

“Where’s Bobby?”

You know the drill. It’s like they expect you to think of what they want every second of the day. So I lay out this story about how Bobby wanted to get together with some of his old friends from around town, and we just lost track of time. Of course, Dad doesn’t think losing track of time is a good excuse, but he buys the story. After all, it’s pretty much true. I just left out some of the details.

Mom’s all deflated because Bobby’s spending the night at Chuck’s. She’s worried he’s going to get sidetracked with his
friends and not make it to the big barbecue party on Saturday, but I tell her not to worry. “He wouldn’t miss that for anything,” I tell her. “That’s practically all he could talk about—how great it’s going to be.”

That calms them down, so they let me off with a warning about how I’m sixteen now and need to be more responsible. I’m tempted to come back with a wisecrack about how responsible they were to let their son get shipped off to a war, but I figure it’s best to leave that alone for a while and just head to my room, where I can put the earbuds in and crank something loud.

Of course, the truth is Bobby never said he was charged up about the barbecue, but I can’t help thinking it might actually be good for him, get him around normal people instead of Captain Crazy. It’ll also give him a chance to see how much respect everyone has for him and what he’s done for our country, even if the judge and lawyers and all the other dickheads gave him a bad deal by sending him over. He’s a hero and everybody knows it. Well, almost everybody.

I can’t believe it the next day when Mom tells me Lacy won’t be coming back from Grandma’s for Bobby’s homecoming. I’m like, God, what a self-centered little creep. I call her and lay right into her before she can even get
hello
all the way out of her mouth. I’m all about how much Bobby’s meant to our family, to us kids, to our town, and to the whole country. “I’m sure you met some pimple-faced boy over there in Davenport you think you can’t live without,” I tell her, “but you need to start thinking about someone else besides yourself for a change and get down here and support your big brother.”

But she has her argument ready. “It’s not any boy, Ceejay. It’s Grandma. She needs help around the house.”

Right. I’m not buying that, not with Mom always going around advertising how great Grandma’s doing with her treatments. “Are you telling me Grandma can’t get by one weekend without you? I mean, what do you do for her anyway? I have to do your chores for you half the time.”

She comes back with how she does a lot, that Grandma even taught her how to cook, which makes me laugh. “Sure,” I tell her. “What do you do, make toast? Besides, what’s Grandma ever done for us in the past but treat us like stray cats. I’m talking about you being here for your brother’s homecoming from the war. The
war
, Lacy. Can you get your little peanut brain around that? Bobby was always here for us back when he lived at home. One hundred percent. Grandma sure wasn’t.”

“He was there for
you
.” Her voice sounds small.

“What?”

“He was there for you, Ceejay. You were his pet. He hardly even talked to me, acted like I was too little to bother with. I mean, I love him and all, but you two were the ones who were close. It was like you had your own club and the rest of us weren’t invited to join.”

How about that? Mommy and Daddy’s little princess trying to act like
she
was the outsider around the house. Ridiculous. I’m like, “Hey, we tried to include you a lot more than Grandma ever did. Remember that time we played Storm the Castle at her house? Bobby was Sir Lancelot and I was Joan of Arc and—”

Lacy cuts in. “And I was your servant, Little Miss Puddin’ Head.”

I can’t help but laugh. You have to admit it’s a funny name, but I guess it wasn’t so funny to her at the time.

“The point is,” I say, “how many fifteen-year-old boys are going to go out of their way to play games just to entertain their
little sisters. And what happens? Grandma has to go and ruin the whole thing by throwing a fit all over us.”

“You stole her lawn gnome and tossed it off the Twelfth Street bridge.”

“Well, that’s the kind of thing that happens to people who treat you like crap.”

Just for the record, here’s what happened with the lawn gnome incident. We were on one of our rare visits to Grandma’s—I was about nine—and Grandma confiscated my skates from me for skating in her kitchen. Took them and said she wasn’t giving them back till I left the next day. This was back when I thought I wanted to be in the roller derby, so those skates meant a lot to me.

Anyway, I got the idea to kidnap her lawn gnome and hold him hostage. Of course, Bobby thought this was hilarious and volunteered to help me carry him across the Twelfth Street bridge, where we could stash him behind the grade school. Then we’d lay out the deal to Grandma—she’d get the gnome if I got the skates.

But on the way, Bobby had the idea it would be funny to set the gnome on the bridge railing and pretend he was about to commit suicide.

“Don’t jump, little fella,” Bobby said, standing back like he was afraid to make any sudden moves. “You’ve got your whole life ahead of you!”

“Don’t worry. I’ll save him,” I cried, and lunged for the gnome. Only instead of pulling him back to safety, I accidentally pushed him over the edge.
Crash!
There he was in a million little gnome pieces on the concrete below. I guess we were lucky a car wasn’t driving under the bridge at the time.

At that point, I was all for running away, but Bobby said we had to stay and clean the thing up, then take the shattered
corpse back to Grandma and tell her we’d pay for a new one. I didn’t like the sound of that, but I always did what Bobby said.

The problem was Lacy found out what happened and went running off to squeal to Grandma before we could explain things for ourselves. Of course, Grandma didn’t believe it was a mistake. She accused Bobby of killing her stupid gnome on purpose. And he didn’t even do it—I did!

He took the full blame, though, said I didn’t have anything to do with it, but Grandma didn’t want to hear any explanations. She told us we were just nothing but mean kids and that she shouldn’t be surprised with the way our father raised us. That didn’t sit well with Bobby.

“You’re the one who’s mean,” he said. “Taking a little girl’s skates away for no good reason. You’re just a mean, dried-up old woman.”

That’s when Grandma called him
impertinent
and slapped him.
Pow!
Right across the mouth.

“Go ahead and hit me again,” he said, staring her down. “Hit me as much as you want. But don’t badmouth my sister and my father.”

Grandma’s hand trembled, her lips quivered, her eye twitched, but she didn’t hit him again. She never told our parents about the situation either. I don’t know why. But after that, Bobby and I made every excuse we could to avoid going back to her house.

“And you know what?” I tell Lacy over the phone. “There never would’ve been a big problem if you hadn’t squealed on us to Grandma.”

“Well,” she says, “the only reason I told on you was because you wouldn’t let me go to the bridge with you.”

I had forgotten that part, but it was true. She had begged us to let her go on our gnome adventure.

“Well,” I tell her, “how could we let you go? You were crying like a baby. We didn’t want some little baby going with us.”

“I cried because I wanted to hang out with you. That’s all I wanted when I was little—to hang out with my big sister. But I gave up. You didn’t want me, so I just gave up.”

“And you’re giving up on Bobby now too. Is that it?”

“I’m not giving up, Ceejay. I just can’t come home right now. I just can’t. Bobby will still be there in a month when Grandma’s better, but right now she needs me and Bobby doesn’t.”

I sit quiet for a moment, staring at the wall. What a sister. Her whole life the parents played her as the favorite, and now she’s trying to act like she’s the one nobody wants. Well, if that’s the way she wants it, that’s the way she’ll get it. “You’re right,” I tell her. “He doesn’t need you around. And neither do I.”

Before she can cough out a response, I hang up on her. Usually I’d say that makes me the winner, but somehow, this time, I don’t really feel like I won much of anything.

On the big day, even though there are a lot of preparations to take care of before the party kicks off, Bobby heads out somewhere with Chuck, saying he’ll be back in plenty of time. Mom acts like that’s okay. She says she wouldn’t dream of putting him to work. After all, the party is for him. But as the time for the party gets closer, I catch her glancing at the clock, her usual perky smile still on her face but worry in her eyes. Finally, with about ten minutes to spare, Bobby and Chuck reappear. They’ve been taking care of their own preparations—making sure they have an enormous blue ice chest fully stocked with beer.