“It’s really a shame,” Tucker said with a grin, “that we’re going to have to be enemies now.”
I shot my brother a suspicious look as we set the nightstand down in the middle of the master bedroom of the new house. I’d wanted to get rid of most of this furniture—but what with closing my practice and not working for the past month as we prepared to move to Minnesota, I couldn’t exactly afford to do much shopping until my business kicked in.
“What are you talking about?” I said, exasperated. Tucker smiled, ratty t-shirt damp with sweat—but his relentless cheeriness showed no sign of slowing down.
“Virginia.” he shrugged. “You live here, you gotta root for Virginia during hockey season. But we,” he said, drawing the word out for maximum drama, “gotta root for Eveleth. It’s a deadly rivalry, Cole, and it’s just about the most important thing in the universe ‘round here.”
Inwardly, I was rolling my eyes. Outwardly, I made a sorry attempt to match his smile with my own.
“That’s cute.”
“If you’d just bought a house a few hundred yards to the south, Cole, you coulda rooted for Eveleth, and it would’ve all been fine.”
“Can’t really help where Dr. Nygum’s old practice is located, now can I?” I shot back, wiping sweat from my own face with my own ratty t-shirt. We were in the middle of converting a portion of the sprawling, ranch-style home that housed the veterinary clinic—which I’d just purchased from Bill Nygum, now that he was mostly retired—into a home for me and June, after striking out on finding other living quarters.
I just hoped I wouldn’t come to regret the decision to live where I worked.
“And technically, Melissa found out Bill was selling his practice in the first place,” I reminded him.
“Damn straight, I did!” Melissa’s voice echoed from around the corner, where she was already aggressively tackling the Feng Shui needs of the living room. I didn’t know what the hell Feng Shui even meant, but apparently, it was absolutely vital to the success of our new life in Minnesota to get it right.
And after screwing up everything else, I wasn’t taking any chances.
Anyone listening in on this conversation between myself and my brother would know in an instant that neither one of us was born anywhere near small town Minnesota. Tucker had left our hometown of Guadalupe, Texas to play college football for the University of Texas over a decade ago; and even though he’d come back on occasion for a visit, especially after his accident, he never really came back.
And why should he? There was nothing left for Tucker in Guadalupe. Just a few poor ranches and farms, not much more than a graveyard of broken dreams.
I stayed a lot longer, though, into my thirties. For a young kid like me who wasn’t any good at football, those ranches and farms were the best opportunity I had.
And heck, everyone seemed to think I had a knack for calming the animals. By the time I’d finished high school with a full ride scholarship, veterinary school was a foregone conclusion. After graduation, I had a long list of clients waiting for me—even if nobody else was. Quite the opposite of Tucker, I ran back to Guadalupe, waving that veterinary doctorate around like a flag of victory.
I never thought I’d have any reason to leave that quaint little hole in the sand. The thought echoed through my head, for the millionth miserable time.
My attention came back to the present as Tucker slid the nightstand over a few feet towards the wall, and I heard a sound coming from within it—like something rolling around, loose.
I frowned. We’d emptied the drawers…
“Junebug’s gonna love it here,” Tucker pronounced, leaning against the nightstand. He smiled that crooked coyote smile of his, but I wasn’t really paying attention. All I could think about was whatever was rattling around in that drawer.
Gah, what IS it? The question buzzed around in my head like a fly I could hear, but not catch.
My brother, however, chattered on, oblivious. “I know I’m not likely to find you traipsing through the forest or anything,” he said, “but it might do you some good to get out in the trees and birds and fresh air around here. It ain’t like Texas, living in a convection oven in the desert.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” I countered absently.
The thing inside the nightstand: was it something of... hers, maybe? Something she’d left behind? That had always been her nightstand—exactly the reason I’d wanted to get rid of it so badly.
I’d been standing at the back of the thing, slowly moving around to Tucker’s side, where the drawers were.
“Just sayin’,” he continued, “let me take you and June out to my territory. Up around the lake, she can see some real coyotes...”
“The last thing June needs is to be around other wild animals,” I said dryly. “She’ll pick up all of their bad habits.”
The rest of the bedroom was cluttered with furniture in various states of unpacking. Small boxes—the ones June could carry—were stacked in a corner. She’d vanished once it became clear none of the small boxes contained any of her Legos, and she’d been digging through the contents of the moving truck outside ever since.
“Come on, Cole.” Tucker still stood between me and the drawers like the goddamn Berlin Wall. I desperately wanted to ask him to move, but he already had too much momentum going. “You came here because you said you wanted to leave the past behind. You said no good could come from looking back. You said June needed a change.”
“Yeah, and your point?”
Tucker rested a hand on the nightstand, as if he could sense my urgency to get in there, and was blocking me out of sheer spite. I knew my brother would never actually do something so petty, so maybe it was actually the Universe tossing out a subliminal message to me. Maybe I knew I had no business looking in that drawer, especially because it might be something of hers, and then...
“You didn’t say the real truth, though.”
I stopped, and actually gave my brother my full attention, if only for a brief moment.
“What real truth?”
“The real truth was that you... needed to get out of there.”
“Tuck, come on, man, what did I just say—?”
“And you... needed to acknowledge that you aren’t done hurting yet, and pretending like you are, is no good for anybody. Not for you—and definitely not for June.”
A surprise ripple of rage went through me. My eyes narrowed, and an edge crept into my voice.
“Don’t talk to me about what my daughter needs.” My words sliced the space between us like a steel blade, and I felt the shame of my retort immediately, wishing I could take it back.
Tucker took a step back, as if I’d physically slapped him. The light in his eyes flickered, and for just a moment, his coyote smile faltered.
And still, I continued to reach for the drawer in the nightstand before catching myself, biting my lip against the crushing guilt—yeah, push your brother away so you can continue wallowing. Great plan, genius. I took a deep breath, looking at him.
“Jesus Tuck, I’m sorry… I didn’t mean that.” I couldn’t even meet his eyes, glancing instead at the beige carpet beneath my feet. The air around us felt heavy as Tucker took a second to compose himself.
“I wouldn’t worry about it.” I glanced up to see his familiar smile easing back now.
“Yeah, well… easier said than done,” I murmured, shuffling my feet.
“Bro, seriously—it’s alright,” he said, gently slapping me on the back. “Let’s see what’s clunking around in here, shall we?” And before I could even register what he’d said, Tucker was reaching for the drawer, sliding it open, utterly heedless of what we might find when he did...
I held my breath as he extended a hand into the void, rummaging around in the space. I cringed, as if bracing myself for a blow, until his hand finally emerged with the object.
The snow globe.
The one I’d given her that last Christmas—our last Christmas.
It was perhaps the only thing worse than finding something of hers: finding something I’d given to her, that she’d forgotten about, left unloved in some drawer, and then died to get away from it.
A breath that was almost a sob escaped me, the memories playing out like a horror movie before my eyes. In the space of seconds, I relived seventeen months of buried grief. My breath came ragged, and the world around the snow globe faded away to nothing as I moved towards my brother, taking it in both of my hands.
I sank to the floor, gazing into the globe as if willing it to reveal a happier future for me and my daughter. The ‘snow’ inside had been disturbed from all the rolling and moving about, and it now fell like the rain that rarely came in southwest Texas—like the snow that never did.
A snow globe is always ironic in Guadalupe, but this one was especially so, because the house looked so much like our little stucco ranch, and the little girl outside the house looked so much like our little June—though she had never built or even seen a snowman in real life before.
“A little piece of home,” I’d told my wife, as she’d unwrapped it, just before leaving for her first week of beauty school two hours north. Her bags were already packed, her plans to stay with an old friend during the week already confirmed. “Until you can come back to your real one.”
She was barely speaking to me by this point, and instead of replying, she’d turned away in annoyance, walking back towards our bedroom to grab her suitcase.
It was pointless, by then, to ask her what was wrong. ‘Everything,’ she’d snap, or ‘you’re really going to take this away from me, too?’
I never understood her rage, her bitterness over this life we’d built together. Even before I knew what was really going on, even when we were just fighting, it was like she insisted on being angry, but kept the reason close to her chest.
I drove myself to exhaustion, to the point of falling physically ill, trying to make her happy, to make things right with her. Trying to make her want to stay, at least for June.
It may be wrong to speak ill of the dead, but the truth was she never wanted—or needed—either of us in her life. We were the shackles holding her back. And oh, how I had tried to hold on.
I closed my eyes, still clutching the snow globe and wishing I understood what I could’ve done differently—before it was too late.
“Cole!”
In an instant, I was pulled back to reality. I looked up at my brother angrily.
“What?” I snapped—and there came the guilt again. I was too ashamed this time to even apologize, so I just stood there, hanging my head like an embarrassed four-year-old.
“Cole.” His voice was soft as I looked up again. There was only mercy in his eyes—and for a moment, I wanted to cry.
“I’m sorry,” I said, for the millionth meaningless time.
“You don’t have to be.” There was a long pause between us as I avoided his eyes, just like Carly used to do.
But when I finally met his searching gaze, Tucker’s crooked smile was already creeping back along the lines of his face. “Come on, let’s grab some more stuff.”
I nodded, slowly at first... but as Tucker turned and left the room, I followed, matching his quick pace.
If an animal’s moving, that means it’s still alive. An animal doesn’t stop, doesn’t give up, until it’s dead. Best to keep moving.
It might not make the psychologists happy, but at least for now, it had to be good enough for me.
