…want to follow you this long.” I stared at the photos. The dealership plate frame was the same in every one. Harlan Auto. Bakersfield. I hadn’t been to Bakersfield in twenty years. Not since I left. Not since my brother and I stopped speaking.
The investigator watched my face. “You know that dealership.” I nodded slowly. “My brother owns it. Kevin. We haven’t talked since our father’s funeral.” He closed the folder. “Then I think we should go down to the parking lot. Because that car is outside right now.”
It was. Parked under a streetlight across from the hotel, engine off. The investigator stayed by the lobby door. I walked across the street alone and knocked on the driver’s window. It rolled down slowly. My brother looked back at me, gray-faced, thinner than I remembered, an oxygen tube under his nose.
“I’m sorry,” Kevin said, before I could speak. “I didn’t know how to call you. I’ve picked up the phone a hundred times. I just wanted to see you. Every day, for a little while. See how you live. See if you were happy.” He coughed. “Lung cancer. They gave me six months. That was four months ago.”
I got in the passenger seat. We sat there until two in the morning. He told me he’d driven behind me through four states. He’d watched me buy coffee, pump gas, come home to my wife. “You were always the one who got out,” he said. “I wanted to see what that looked like.”
The investigator called my wife that night and told her the truth. Not the truth she’d paid for. The real one. She flew out the next day. Kevin moved into our guest room a week later. We had him for seven more weeks. They were the best seven weeks I’ve ever had with my brother.
At the funeral, I drove his black sedan home from Bakersfield. I kept the plate frame. My wife never hired anyone again. She told me she didn’t need to. She’d finally figured out why I’d seemed so far away. I’d been feeling someone’s eyes on me for forty-one days, and some part of me had known they were family.
