"You know what the worst part is?" he said finally, his voice rough from drink and from not talking. "I told myself she didn't mind. That it was easier this way. That she'd signed and that was that." He laughed, a short ugly sound. "I was drowning, Di. You don't know. The debts, the job going nowhere, Tina picking up extra shifts and us still barely making it, Josh needing braces we couldn't afford. And then the papers were just... there. So easy. She was out of it, and I told myself she'd thank me later. That I was taking a burden off her. That somebody had to be the one to make the hard decisions around here."
"Somebody had to be you," I said. It wasn't a question.
"Somebody had to be somebody." He took a drink. "You were in Singapore. Somebody had to be here."
The words landed like a slap, because they were true, or true enough. I had been in Singapore. I had sent money and called on Sundays and told myself that was being a daughter. "I know," I said. "I wasn't here. That's on me. But Mark — being here doesn't mean what you did was taking care of her. She was on her hands and knees scrubbing that floor while your family watched television. That's what happened, whether you planned it or not."
He was quiet for a while. The bottle sat between his knees. "I didn't plan it cruel," he said at last, very quietly. "I want you to know that. I didn't sit down one day and decide to steal from our mother. It was — it was like a door that was already open, and I just walked through it, and then I couldn't figure out how to walk back."
I believed him. That was the terrible thing, sitting on those steps in the dark — I believed him, and it didn't excuse a single thing he'd done, and both of those things were true at the same time, and I had to hold them both without letting go of either one.
"I believe you," I said. "And it doesn't change what happened. But I believe you."
He nodded, staring at the street. "Is she going to be all right? With the aide and everything?"
"She's going to be fine," I said. "She's stronger than either of us ever gave her credit for. Maybe stronger than Dad."
That got something out of him — not quite a laugh, but an exhale through his nose. "Dad would've killed me," he said.
"Dad would've been disappointed," I corrected. "There's a difference. He loved being disappointed in us — it was practically his hobby. Remember the go-kart?"
"The go-kart," Mark repeated, and this time it was almost a laugh. When we were twelve and ten we'd tried to build a go-kart out of a laundry basket and roller-skate wheels, and our father had found us halfway down the driveway and delivered a twenty-minute lecture on physics and common sense, and then helped us rebuild it properly the following Saturday.
"He'd have fixed this too," Mark said. "If he were here. He'd have known what to do."
"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe he'd have sat on the porch with us and not known either, and we'd have had to figure it out ourselves. Like now."
Mark was quiet for a bit, and then he said, "Do you ever wish you'd stayed? In Singapore. Just — walked away from all of this."
The question surprised me with its gentleness. I thought about it honestly, the way the night seemed to require. "Some days," I admitted. "In the beginning, when I found Mom on the floor and you told me the house was yours — I wanted to get on a plane so badly I could taste it. It would have been easier. Write a check, hire someone, go back to my life." I looked at him. "But the checks were the problem, Mark. That's what I did for six years — I sent money and called on Sundays and told myself that was being a daughter. It wasn't. It was being a sponsor. There's a difference, and I didn't learn it until I came home and saw what my money hadn't protected her from."
"That's a hard thing to learn at thirty-eight," Mark said.
"Harder at forty-two," I said, "when you learn it the other way."
He huffed — almost a laugh — and we sat with that for a while, two middle-aged children of the same dead father, on the same porch where we'd learned to tie our shoes, trying to figure out how to be siblings again after everything.
We sat a while longer. He asked about Josh — was the boy all right, was he angry — and I told him the truth, that Josh was ashamed of the shouting and worried about his grandmother and trying very hard to be loyal to everyone at once, which was breaking his heart a little. Mark's face did something complicated at that. "I'll talk to him," he said. "Properly. Not — not like I've been."