The gravel crunched the same way it always did when I turned my truck off the county road and onto my aunt’s land, and for a second, pulling in past the mailbox with the sunflowers painted on it, I was eleven years old again, riding the tailgate of my father’s pickup with my knees skinned from the creek. Some places do that to you. They hold every version of you at once, the boy and the man, standing in the same pair of boots.
I parked behind my cousin’s minivan, cut the engine, and sat there for a second longer than I needed to.
Susan reached over and put her hand on my arm. “You good?”
“I’m good.”
“You know Randy’s going to say something the second you get out of this truck.”
“He always does.”
She smiled at me, that patient smile she’s given me for twenty-two years now, the one that means she’s not going to push me but she’s not going to pretend she doesn’t know what’s underneath it either. “One of these years,” she said.
“Maybe,” I said, and got out.
I want to explain something before I tell you the rest of it, because if you only heard about that Saturday in July, you’d think it was about a truck and a joke and two hundred trucks in a gravel yard forty minutes from where we were standing. It wasn’t. Not really. It was about something that started a long time before that, back when Randy and I were boys sharing a bedroom with a strip of masking tape down the middle of the floor, and it took me most of my life to understand what I was actually protecting when I kept my mouth shut about what I’d built.
So let me start there.
**
I’m Mark Webster. I’m forty-five years old, I grew up on eighty acres outside Coldwater with my brother Randy and our parents, and from about the time I could talk, I was the second one. Not the second child. The second one. There’s a difference, and if you grew up with an older brother who was good at everything he tried, you already know what it is.
Randy was quarterback of a team that went 2-8 his senior year, and somehow everybody in town still talked about his arm like he’d played for Mizzou. He got the grades that got him into college. He got the girl everybody wanted him to get, married her at twenty-four, divorced her at thirty-one, and even that got told around town like a story about Randy weathering something hard. He got the job in Springfield with the company car and the title that sounded impressive when my mother said it to her friends at church. Senior claims adjuster. She liked saying “adjuster.” It sounded like something.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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