And what she had written told me exactly what she had seen happening between us that we were both too stubborn to fix, and the last sentence was the kind of thing only a mother can say from the far side of the grave and get away with.
She had written it in the months before she died, four years ago, and hidden it in her things where she knew Danny would eventually find it — knowing my brother, knowing he would drive it the six hours to me because that is the sort of errand a grieving son takes on, knowing the two of us would need a reason to stand on a porch together again. She had engineered the whole thing. Even gone, she was still mothering us.
On the back of that black-and-white photo of two little boys under the old oak, in her recent careful hand, she wrote that she had watched us drift for twenty years and had said nothing, because she kept believing we would find our own way back. She wrote that she had run out of time to keep believing it for us. She wrote that the two boys in that picture had once been unable to fall asleep in separate rooms, and that whatever had grown up between the men they became, those boys were still in there, and still brothers.
And the last sentence said: “Don’t wait until you’re standing over the other one’s box to remember you loved each other. Fix it while you can still hear it said out loud. — Mom.”
I read that in February, alone in my kitchen, a month after my brother had a stroke.
Danny is alive. He is recovering slowly, and the drive from Cincinnati is a different kind of complicated now, the kind that involves his wife and a folding wheelchair and a lot of planning. But I have made that drive four times since February, because my mother was right — she was always right — and because I nearly waited until it was a box after all.
We do not talk much about the twenty years. There is not a lot of point, and neither of us is the sort to do it well anyway. We watch football. I help with his exercises. Last week he got a word out that had been stuck for a month, and we both pretended it was no big deal and both knew it was everything.
The photograph is on my refrigerator still, but I have turned it around now, so my mother’s writing faces out. It is the last thing she ever said to either of us, and she said it to both of us at once, and it worked. Two stubborn men in their sixties, sitting on a porch again because their mother reached forward from four years gone to put them there.
She knew we needed a reason. So she made herself into one. That was Mom, right to the end and past it.
