"The Moon Rose Late" by Marjorie Vujnovich
We're in the same Denny's we always come to, and they've closed the smoking room for good, so we bite our fingernails as we talk.
My brothers and I, we don't talk much.
Ben says, "I don't know," to everything. Sometimes, "I don't care," and checks his watch again and again.
And Eliot hasn't made eye contact with either of us in years.
Eliot, Ben, and I – we lie to each other, to ourselves, to anyone who will listen, because we grew up trying to hide the truth and it's not a habit you shake easily.
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One truth is that I grew up with lungs full of smoke from a fire that I don't remember.
Imagine the dusky smell of that smoke and burnt wood. Imagine it everywhere, for the rest of your life. Yeah. That's what it was like.
And you've probably heard the story, it was all over the news – but what you should know is that my brothers and I grew up with ghost stories instead of bedtime stories, and that isn't fair.
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I catch whispers in the restaurant kitchen when I'm sixteen, not the first time I've heard someone talk about that night, but the worst – the busboys talk Spanish unafraid because I'm a little white boy, wouldn't understand – about the family with the drunk mother, about us. I balance bowls of soup on my arms and don't look at them. I don't need a disguise: I have my pale skin, my mother's freckles, my father's closed face.
They say, she was drinking that night, did it on purpose.
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I come home every few years now to meet my brothers at the same diner: Eliot always thinner and taller, like he's being pulled upwards, and Ben fading differently.
We moved apart not accidentally. Stories follow less easily if you separate the characters, we hoped.
Everyone's heard that story, but you should know, I think our mother loved us.
Our mother, her name was Susan, but the song the little girls sing in their jumpropes goes Susie, Susie.
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The moon rose late, low and deep orange, the night of the fire.
This is what Ben says, and when he could he moved to the city, where he never sees the moon, anymore.
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You should know that what's written all over town, carved into desks in the middle school and murmured close in the back of every kitchen – you should know that it's just rumors.
The graffiti all over the walls by the train tracks, you should know that it's only half true.
Later I will take my drink straight up, and later I will love girls who have never been to the midwest at all, who didn't grow up anywhere near Kansas. Later I won't love much.
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The thing is, we had a sister, once. I was two so I don't remember, but Eliot and Ben. Eliot and Ben were six and seven, and they do.
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Our father who left in two ways, he sent us postcards to the old address, and sometimes one of us would come home clutching an envelope and we'd open it together, in a closed room somewhere, so our mother wouldn't see.
No one rebuilt the house because our mother didn't want it done, and you can't see it from the road and she owned that land, so it stayed charred, and that is one reason the stories stayed so well.
The mailbox stood at the end of the driveway, by the road, and the truth is, I don't know why my mother didn't leave until the firemen carried her out.
I don't know why no one called the fire department until the roof was already caved in, and I don't know why I didn't get to have the sister who lived only a few weeks.
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I was antsy not half an hour into the meal, as usual, and ready to go – needed a curving road or a setting moon, at least some more coffee.
I think we come home to see if people still talk, to see if it's safe yet. As long as the remains of the house are still there, as long as our mother still lives in the house she bought after the first one burnt…
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We had a sister, once, and my brother, Ben, he carried me out of the burning house. And my father, he was out of town that weekend.
Another thing I was too young to remember is when my dad left for good.
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The food is bad, and we leave that night, and the moon is high and bright. And the air smells like smoke.
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