“You’re always defending people,” said my brother Scott the other day at lunch. We were at Luke’s, a fast food place on Jackson Boulevard in the Loop not far from where he works. He thought it would be a good place to meet since the food is good and service is fast, knowing I might not be able to spare a full hour.

“Of course I do. It’s my job,” I said, wrapping up the other half of my Italian meatball sandwich to save for later.

“No. That’s not what I mean.” He took another bite of his bacon cheeseburger. He chewed, swallowed, took a sip from his Coke, and said, “I mean that you don’t let people say a bad thing about anyone, especially Ken. I say something about Ken, about how he always managed to create his own messes and you dispute it. You never let anyone say a bad thing about him.”

“Because people have said enough bad things about him,” I said, finishing my diet Coke.

“You admit that he created his own messes, though, right?”

I looked at my brother, the mortgage banker in the navy blue suit, white shirt, and wine-colored tie, the straight-as-an-arrow one out of the three of us Post kids, the one who has never had to defend the need for his vocation, and I took a big breath and exhaled through my nose. I thought how sibling rivalry never dies and how it always seemed I was the only advocate our older brother Ken had in our family. That no matter he had paid for his mistakes through the life he had led, it wasn’t good enough for some people, even our own brother.

“Right?” he asked.

“Enough people in our family have criticized him,” I said. “You know what he’s lived through. There’s more crap churning inside that mind of his than most of the people I accompany to court every week.”

“But he’s always known better, Anne.”

“Then why are you dredging all this up now? He’s successful now. Legitimately. He’s got more money than you and I will probably ever live to see.”

“Through just as much shiftiness as before, like the rest of those dotcom millionaires.”

“He’s worked hard. There’s nothing shifty about developing an idea with some people and striking gold with it. He’ll be the first to tell you that luck was involved. He’s not— I can’t believe we’re even arguing about this. He nearly destroyed himself and he’s since reconciled with mom and dad. So what is your point?”

“To see if you’ll ever admit his guilt. He has. Why can’t you?”

I grabbed the remains of my sandwich, stuffed it into my bag, slung the bag on my shoulder, picked my garbage off the table, and said, “I have to go. I have to meet with a client before we go into a juvenile court hearing in less than an hour.”

For the rest of the day, while in court, answering calls, updating my case files, preparing summonses, going over my opening for a trial that started the next day, and meeting with the client in the county jail to discuss his testimony for the trial, I couldn’t stop thinking about coming up with an answer to Scott. I didn’t deny the facts of what Ken had done. And it wasn’t the first time either a member of my family or a friend outside the legal profession had accused me of equivocating. But as a public defender it’s my job to advocate for the disadvantaged clients that the state assigns to me. But I also can’t stand it when Scott gets the better of me in an argument. I know I should be better than that. I should not hate for him to be right.

It was after nine when I got to my apartment. I put my leftover meatball half-sandwich into the fridge and pulled the leftover take-out cashew chicken from the night before and heated that up in my microwave. Then I sat and ate at my kitchen table. In my mind I kept replaying the lunchtime conversation with Scott, and every time I got to his question about Ken’s guilt, I couldn’t come up with an answer, and I thought Scott might be right.

So I thought I might try to outline the case: my opening arguments, witness accounts, and closing arguments. Did Ken have a case? I pulled out one of my yellow legal pads and a pen from my bag and I started to write. I couldn’t get past the words “This case...” I sipped some water from my glass and I thought about how I had failed to defend Ken the first time an opportunity had presented itself. I wrote about that. I was fourteen. I was riding the bus home that day, tapping the front of my foot on the floor, and thinking about how it was Ken who had introduced me to the Jane’s Addiction CD “Nothing’s Shocking.” And how he wasn’t around anymore to introduce me to new things. He was gone and I missed him.

“They’re weird, in a bad way,” said Christina, my best friend at the time. She was sitting next to me on the aisle side of the seat. We were freshman, and on more than one occasion that year she had told me she thought the new friends I had made at West Montrose High School were weird in a bad way.

“No, in a good way,” I said, tucking a strand of hair behind my left ear. I still love that Jane’s Addiction CD. Ken had introduced a lot of things like that to me. He continues to do so. But I’ve never had that kind of relationship with Scott. Where Ken was edgier and suspicious, Scott was soft and enthusiastic. Scott set out early on to be whatever Ken wasn’t.

From across the aisle, Christina’s brother Rigo said, “If he gets off at our stop to follow you, Christina, I’m gonna kick his ass.”

“He doesn’t bother me,” said Christina. “He’s never once touched me.”

With her long black hair, dark eyes, curves, and brown skin, Christina was one of the prettiest girls in the freshman class. There were many boys competing for her. She enjoyed all the attention and I can now admit that I was jealous of it. At least six boys had asked her to the Homecoming Dance that year. Eventually she decided to go with one of Rigo’s friends. I didn’t go. No one had asked me. Not that it would have mattered because my parents had refused to let me go on dates with boys until I turned 15, which would come that following August. I was not happy about having to wait for what seemed like an eternity.

“Well, he bothers me,” said Rigo, looking towards the front of the bus. His head was moving quick and sharp like a bird. I couldn’t make out where Patrick Schultz was sitting. I knew he was somewhere near the front.

“He’s a little creepy. That’s all. He won’t even touch me.”

“Well, we know he touches himself. That’s all everyone’s talking about. You should’ve heard them in my gym class. They were saying, ‘Hey Rigo, Patrick whacks off to your sister.’ They wouldn’t shut up about it.”

Supposedly, Patrick had been caught masturbating in the boy’s restroom. He had excused himself during our Honors English class and didn’t return right away. Just before class ended our teacher Mr. Dell received a note, which he read, and then said, in his normal conversational voice and not his teaching voice, that Patrick wasn’t coming back because he was in the Dean’s Office. Mr. Dell had seemed slightly shocked. Some of us murmured our own muted surprise. It was not like Patrick to be sent to the Dean’s Office. Later, Billy Majka from our Biology class would claim Patrick was slapping away, chanting Christina’s name, when a hall monitor caught him. That was the rumor. Though Billy was about as reliable as the Chicago area weather, I did half-believe it. Given that knowledge was passed on at that age largely through hearsay, it had seemed plausible.

“I don’t think about it,” said Christina. But I had seen some of the other kids point and snicker at her. Just before we had gotten on the bus to go home that day she told me it was driving her crazy.

“You should. Why do you think he follows you all the time?” asked Rigo.

“He’s harmless,” I said, leaning over just enough to see around Christina.

Rigo’s face was set in a scowl. “If he was followin’ you around, Anne, do you think your brothers would put up with it?”

Rigo was right but I didn’t want to admit it. I know my brothers. Scott and Ken would have definitely done something. At the time Scott was a senior, a bench-warming fullback for the football team and the starting point guard for the basketball team. He would have most likely done something himself, probably by threatening and shaking the offending guy, but careful not to do anything that would tarnish his eligibility for playing sports or his standing as Vice-President of the school’s chapter of the National Honor Society. Ken, who didn’t have Scott’s brawn, would have had one of his tough friends handle it, like Jimmy McCabe, the kind of guy that even big football players were afraid of. That was for good reason. If the person you’re being threatened by really doesn’t mind doing time as payment for backing up his threat, no matter how big and strong you are, you tend to think twice before actively countering that threat.

I had always thought my brothers were too protective of me. Scott would ask me all the time to ride to and from school with him and his jock friends, but I couldn’t stand them. That was partly my problem with Rigo; he was a wrestler, smarter than the average jock, but still a hothead.

“They wouldn’t,” said Rigo. “And you know it.”

“That’s not the point,” I said.

“Then what is?”

I slumped back against the green vinyl seat with a slap. I cradled my books and notebooks a little tighter. I didn’t know. The whole situation with Patrick seemed creepy to me. I shuddered slightly as the thought of a guy whacking off to me settled momentarily in my mind. But I didn’t think Rigo beating the crap out of Patrick was going to fix anything. It would not have been a fair fight. I hardly knew Patrick. As far as I had known, he had never even been in a fight. Rigo was a sophomore who had placed third in the state tournament in his weight class. He was aiming for a wrestling scholarship to college. (He ended up joining the Army, serving in the first Gulf War and going to U. of I. at Chicago on the G.I. Bill.) Before high school he’d had more than his fair share of fights. The Ybarras were the only Mexican family on the block. Kids in white working class neighborhoods are not exactly subtle about their prejudices. It’s not that we didn’t have Mexicans at school. About a third of the student population was Mexican. Those who were poor generally lived in a large complex of run-down apartments on the other side of town squeezed between some factories and the train yard. White people called that area “The Jungle.” If you wanted to buy drugs, you had to go to the Mexican gangs. It wasn’t like it had been for Ken, when the traditional mullet-wearing metal-headed stoners had dealt all the drugs. By the time I had gotten to high school things had changed.

My parents, and many of the other families on our block, were wary of the Ybarras when they first moved in. I remember overhearing solemn conversations among the neighbors about “property values.” The Ybarras bought the worst house on the block and turned it into the nicest one. Christina’s father had his own carpentry business. He redid everything: the siding, the roof, the garage, the driveway, the flooring, the kitchen. They even added a huge deck behind the house and put in an aboveground pool. The summer before our freshman year all Christina and I did was swim, watch soap operas, talk about boys and our other friends, and give each other manicures. The Ybarras were then considered to be what my father called “good neighbors.”

“I know your brothers,” said Rigo. “They’d have the balls to take care of it. Just like I’m about to. Once and for all.”

I thought Christina should have told her brother to shutup. But she never did that to her brother. When it came to boys, she would let them do most of the talking. I would tell her I didn’t know how she could stand it. She would tell me that I was too mouthy and that more boys would talk to me if I didn’t have such an attitude.

The bus made a turn, raced up the sloping block, and jerked to a stop at the corner where Christina, Rigo, and I got off, sometimes distantly followed by Patrick. The first time I had ever seen Patrick was when he got on the bus the first day of high school. We hadn’t figured out why Patrick got off at our stop instead of his, which was further down and over a block or two. None of us had thought to ask him. He didn’t talk much to anyone. Sometime before Christmas we assumed he was following Christina. I’m still not sure when that idea was planted in our minds. The few times we did talk to him, he was shy but always nice. Because he and I were in some honors classes together, I would sometimes ask him a question or two about an assignment. But that was it. We weren't even what could be considered acquaintances. He didn’t start conversations. Up to that point, all I was able to find out about him was that he was living with his grandparents. Nothing about his parents, not even a rumor. He was mostly quiet in class, but thoughtful whenever he spoke up, clear-voiced and sure. Outside the classroom, he spoke low as if he had been defeated long ago in some brutal contest without knowing why. Teachers liked him. Most of the students didn’t, because he was withdrawn and obviously smarter than the rest of us. The resulting taunts, stares, gossip, and shoves didn’t encourage him to engage with his peers. Now when I think about Patrick and all that was said and done, those rumors about him seem to me a function of people’s frustration to comprehend him. All that mystery demanded a clear explanation. And if people weren’t given one, they were going to supply it themselves. People manufacture what they don’t have, be it knowledge, money, or even respect, using whatever means they have. As a public defender, I spend my days defending people who have gone to egregious lengths to manufacture what they don’t have.

The three of us stood up and made our way down the aisle. Patrick was sitting by himself on the left side, staring out the window. Once off the bus, we crossed the street and headed towards our homes. The sky was filled with gray clouds left over from the heavy rains that morning. It was chilly and everything was still very wet. My block in Fairview was filled with three-bedroom Cape Cods and a ranch house or a brick home sprinkled frugally here and there for some minimal diversity.

“I knew that fucker couldn’t control himself,” muttered Rigo, looking over his shoulder. He was only an inch or two taller than me.

“It’s a free country,” I said. “He can walk wherever he wants.”

I heard the rumble of the yellow bus and watched it pass us. Rigo turned around and so did Christina.

“Why don’t you get off at your own stop? Down there?” shouted Rigo. The bus was nearing the end of the block where it would turn right.

I turned and saw Patrick standing on the sidewalk about 20 feet behind us. He was looking down at the ground, like he was ashamed of something. He was skinny with dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, and light skin. He wore a pair of gray wire-rimmed glasses on his oval-shaped head. At that moment he reminded me of my brother Ken; smart, small, skinny, and awkward. It makes sense to me now why Ken had the kinds of tough but troublesome friends he did back then. They provided a form of cover that Patrick didn’t have.

The rest of the students who had gotten off the bus had stopped to see what was going on. They were spread out from the corner, looking at Rigo and Patrick.

“I want you to stop following my sister,” said Rigo, stepping closer to Patrick. Patrick didn’t look up, didn’t say a word.

Rigo took another step, letting his book bag fall to the ground. “Are you listening?”

I wanted Patrick to speak up in defense of himself, to explain, to plead, to beg, anything to keep Rigo from hitting him.

“What the fuck is your problem?” Rigo screamed in Patrick’s face. He was getting more angry. Because it was as if Patrick heard him but refused to react. I had thought it was absolutely crazy. He wouldn’t talk or move or look up. He just kept looking down at the darkened cement in front of him.

The four of us were standing on the sidewalk in front of the Murphy’s maroon-trimmed white house. Mr. and Mrs. Murphy both worked. Their sons were grown and living on their own. Todd was an electrician. Brad was a truck mechanic. My father, an autobody repairman, had helped Brad get his first job. With no one home at the Murphy’s no one would be able to look out their windows and notice what was taking place on the sidewalk out front. The small crowd had inched closer.

I wanted to say something. I also wanted Christina to say something. But she didn’t. She stood behind Rigo, holding her books like some meek little servant. I hated her at that moment, thinking all she had to do was speak up for Patrick and herself. He had never once touched her or said so much as a harmful word to her. No matter what he had done in the bathroom, Christina had to have known that Patrick could not defend himself against Rigo. It was going to be a slaughter.

“I said, stay away from my sister!”

Patrick looked up at him for a split second and then a smile formed on his mouth and he started to chuckle as if to himself.

“What’s so funny?”

Patrick laughed. I didn’t understand why. I thought there was nothing funny about getting beat up by a state champion wrestler. But there are times when a situation seems so hopelessly ridiculous that the only defense a person can muster is laughter.

“What’s so fuckin’ funny?” Rigo yelled, his face redder.

Patrick shook his head a little.

Rigo folded his arms, waited a second or two, then calmly said, “Take off your glasses.”

Patrick stopped chuckling.

“I said, take them off.”

Patrick frowned, looking confused.

“I don’t want to break your glasses when I break your nose,” said Rigo.

I remember thinking, why do guys act this way with each other? I hate them. Then I wished either Ken or Scott would show up to stop it, or that Patrick would run away. But Patrick didn’t even show the energy necessary to perform a slow jog. There was the possibility of Scott cruising by in one of his friends’ cars, but he might have sided with the jock Rigo. Ken was gone for good it seemed. I was wishing that he would show up, say he was home for good and that he had missed me, get Rigo to back off, and thereby save the younger alternative version of himself. I was wishing so hard that the scene unfolded before my eyes for a few moments.

“The choice is yours,” Rigo said.

Patrick raised one of his hands to his face, somber without even a hint of the uncomfortable humor he had displayed moments before, and plucked the wire-rimmed glasses off his head. He carefully folded them and tucked them into one of the inside pockets of his jean jacket. Rigo was nodding.

Christina held her head down, arms folded, eyes peering up at the scene in front of us. She hugged her books a little more tightly to her chest.

What is Patrick doing? I thought. Run. Don’t stand there. Please, just run, run, run.

“Good,” said Rigo. And then Rigo’s right fist blurred to Patrick’s face with a dull crack. Patrick’s head snapped to the side before falling back with the rest of his body.

My free hand cupped my mouth, the other squeezed my books. Patrick’s head and body hit the grass next to the sidewalk. He lay there on his back while blood trickled out of his left nostril.

Rigo stood over him. “I don’t want to see you get off at this stop ever again!”

This has to stop, I thought, this has to stop now. How can you beat someone who doesn’t fight back? So I shouted, “Leave him alone already!” Then I dropped my books and shoved myself between Rigo, who was standing with his fists clenched, and Patrick who was lying on the wet grass, holding his nose with one hand. “He hasn’t done a thing to you or anyone else! What the hell is your problem?”

“He’s a freak and a pervert!”

“And you’re the biggest asshole I’ve ever met,” I said.

“I find that difficult to believe,” said Rigo. I knew what he was insinuating. I wanted to hit him for saying that and for hitting Patrick.

“Get out of here.”

“I can do whatever I want.” Rigo’s eyes were aimed at Patrick. He took a step to his right and I followed, staying between him and Patrick. I knew he wouldn’t hit me, but he might have pushed me out of the way. I was prepared to stay between him and Patrick no matter what. It had to stop.

“You’ve done enough,” I said.

He took a step back and threw out an arm. “Who asked you to butt in, huh? It’s none of your business.”

“You didn’t mind me butting in a few days after you and Christina moved to this block. Remember?”

He looked down to the ground and pointed. “This is different,” he said.

“Jimmy McCabe would’ve beaten you senseless if I hadn’t been there and said something. Remember? Remember what he said? Remember what he called you? Remember how I stood between you and him? What is wrong with you!”

Rigo’s eyes darted from me to Patrick then back to me. Then he pointed past me at Patrick and said, “Stay away from my sister.” And he picked up his book bag and walked off.

Christina stood there, staring at me, horrified, like I was the guilty person.

“What?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Why didn’t you stop him? Why didn’t you say anything? He’s your brother.”

“I dunno...You can’t control what people do,” she said, playing with the frayed end of one of her notebooks. The small crowd was drifting away.

“Yes, you can,” I said.

“Okay,” she said with a roll of her eyes and a flip of her hand up as if to say “whatever.”

“Why is your brother such an asshole?” I asked.

“At least my brother is here looking out for me,” she said as if stating some obvious fact that I had forgotten.

But I had not been able to forget, not since the frozen January night when it seemed he had left for good. Standing on the sidewalk, I wanted to curl up into a ball and cry until my eyes fell out. I missed Ken so much. How could she say that to me? She was supposed to be my best friend. But that year in high school it seemed I was liking and doing things she didn’t like. And she was liking and doing things I didn’t like. And now she’d compared her brother to mine. And I was angry at her for saying it and I was angry at Ken for leaving and I was angry because I didn’t have comeback. I had no defense for him or my family.

I remember breathing deeply, trying to stop what was coming. I closed my eyes tight and turned my head. When I opened my eyes I was looking across the street at the Giannelli’s brick house. The rain had turned the dark red brick almost brown. The grass looked greener and deeper. With the black roof, the house looked like a large roughly formed lump of mud sticking out of the ground; some sort of ugly aberration in the middle of the rest of the houses that were covered in aluminum siding in either subdued shades of cream or tan. Looking down the block, my eyes always caught it; it’s color and texture were so different from the other houses, including my own. I always liked that house. It’s brick colors had a richness and weight that was lacking in the rest of the houses on the block. Mr. Giannelli had been the Alderman for that area of town for 20 years. He once told me that his father had been a bricklayer and had put up the walls of the house.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that,” she said. I felt her hand lightly touch my shoulder.

I shook her off. “Just go. Leave me alone.”

“I’m sorry.”

I believed her but I didn’t want her to so much as look at me. “Please. Just go,” I said.

She took a few slow steps back, then she turned away and walked towards her house.

Patrick was still on the ground, holding his nose. He moved his hand away and inhaled fast a few times through his nose. The crowd had started walking away, some looking back.

“You all right now?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Patrick. He stood up, holding his nose and refusing my hand.
The right side of his mouth went up a little. “Thank you for sticking up for me.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “Let me see your face.” I put my hand to his cheek and looked. It was warm. Just under the eye, where the bone was, it was turning blue and black and purple. “You’re getting a black eye. You need to ice it. Come with me. I’ve got some at my house.”

“No. That’s all right. I’ll do it when I get home.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“You’d better. Otherwise it’s going to swell up bad.”

I picked up my books and we started walking, slowly. Patrick put his glasses back on. That’s when I noticed that he didn’t have any books with him.

“Do you want a cigarette?” He pulled a pack from his jean jacket pocket. They were Marlboros. He always lit up a cigarette when he got off at our stop.

I hesitated.

“I know you smoke. I’ve seen you,” he said.

“Are you watching me, too?” I asked.

He shook his plaintive face. “I’m not watching anybody. I’ve just seen you smoke a few times. That’s all.”

I reached out my hand and took one. He lit it for me.

I had been smoking since winter; to keep warm when I was standing outside in the cold waiting for the bus. The bus always seemed to take forever every morning. Christina hadn’t liked me smoking. (Neither did Scott, who had threatened to tell our parents on me.) But then I hadn’t liked her talking about trying out for the cheerleading squad when we started our sophomore year. I believed I couldn’t do something that required so much peppy energy. She told me I could and that I might enjoy it. (She did try out, and by senior year she was the captain.) I told her I enjoyed smoking. I knew it was bad for me but I didn’t care. I liked the taste of it. And it was relaxing. It’s a bad habit I still have, with effects I try to offset by jogging and working out at Bally’s.

“I heard you got suspended,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Howcome?”

He held up his cigarette.

“Smoking?”

He nodded.

“It wasn’t for–” I didn’t want to say what people were saying. I was also shocked at how wrong I and everyone else had been about him. I wondered how the story about Christina had gotten started in the first place.

“For what?”

I shook my head. “Nevermind.”

“What are they saying?”

“I can’t say. It’s gross. I don’t know how the rumor got started.”

He took another drag, a long one. I remember thinking that for a geek he looked pretty composed with a cigarette in his mouth.

“Why does a guy like you smoke?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Something to do. I know that’s not the most intelligent reason. But sometimes I don’t know what to do with myself...I usually get off with you guys so that I have time to smoke a cigarette or two before I get home. I don’t want my grandparents to know I smoke.”

“Why didn’t you explain that to Rigo?” I asked. Everything people thought they knew about him was so completely wrong, that I didn’t know where to begin to find a way to correct it. It didn’t seem fair. If only they had asked. If only he had spoken up for himself.

“I thought talking was pointless. It usually is in those situations.”

“You don’t always have to accept the world as it is.”

“It’s easier if you do. That’s why I had to laugh. It’s kind of funny that he thought I was following his sister.”

I didn’t say anything, thinking that was a strange way to look at getting beat up. I kept on smoking as we passed a couple houses.

“Who’s Jimmy McCabe?” he asked.

“Someone you don’t want to know.”

Someone I had wished I didn’t know. Someone I had wished Ken didn’t know because he had helped him deal drugs.

“Why did you do all that for me?”

“Because it was wrong what Rigo was doing. And he knows better.”

“Looks like you’re some kind of superhero.”

He smiled at me with what seemed to be admiration. I didn’t feel big and strong like a superhero. I was thinking that I didn’t know how to talk to Christina anymore. I didn’t know what I was going to say to her the next morning at the bus stop.

“Hardly,” I said. “People listen to superheroes. They admire superheroes. They fear superheroes. No one hears me, admires me, or fears me.”

Neither of us seemed to be in a hurry; our pace was slow.

“Christina wasn’t talking about Scott, was she?”

“No. My other brother, Ken,” I said. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

He shook his head no.

“They’re a pain in the ass,” I said, looking straight ahead, focusing on the busted up stump from the Chinese Elm tree that used to hang over the street and sidewalk in front of my house. “Brothers especially. They don’t want you acting like the same kind of girls they’re trying to nail...They tease you, protect you,” I took another drag, “and then they leave.”

Patrick didn’t say anything as we passed Christina’s gray house. I caught her looking at us from her living room window across the street, and she let the creamy drape fall to conceal herself. When we were younger, we used to play hide and seek in her house, sometimes hiding behind those same drapes.

I have since gained and lost friends. Knowing that’s how life works doesn’t make it easier to handle the moment of recognition that the close friendship is over. The last I had heard about Christina was that she had become a junior high school teacher.

“Where is he?” Patrick asked.

The wind blew and I had to push my hair back out of my face, tucking it behind my ear again. “Gone,” I said.

In February, Scott and I had received postcards of the Hollywood sign from Ken, saying he was alive and well in L.A. He didn’t include an address or phone number. I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t let me call him, or why he wouldn’t at least call me. I was angry at him for hanging out with Jimmy, for dealing cocaine to help pay for his college education, for letting his girlfriend OD, for leaving and for not giving me a way to reach him. I had listened, from the relative safety of my bedroom to that final argument between my parents and Ken in our living room. It was very one-sided, with our father voicing the rage, our mother voicing despair, with Ken every so often offering his apologies, and with Scott unexpectedly finding himself stranded in the dining room with no way to avoid being silent witness to the proceedings. Towards the end I had heard Ken cry. I was angry at my parents for coming down so hard on him and scaring him even more than he had been already. Christina was the only person to whom I had told any of that, ashamed for my brother and my family.

After Ken’s departure, Scott and I felt guilty too, afraid that our parents would ask us if we had known what Ken had been doing. And the answer was of course we had known. We knew our brother and how he had always believed in his own flawless ability to think himself in and out of situations. But how could we have said anything? Would it have mattered? Scott and I have never talked at length about it. Scott has maintained that his own inaction doesn’t make him guilty in any way, that Ken was solely to blame. That may be true, but I have wondered if by saying something we could have saved Ken from himself; an echo to the question Ken has told me he has often asked himself about the young woman who lost her life partly because of him.

“This is your house, right?” We came to a stop in front of the empty driveway.

“Yeah,” I said.

I knew Scott wasn’t home yet. He was probably hanging around with his friends playing Nintendo. My father wouldn’t be home until about five-thirty. My mother wouldn’t be home until five. I would have to call her at work to find out what she wanted me to do to get dinner started, as I did everyday after school.

“Thanks again.”

“You sure you don’t need some ice right now?” His nose had stopped bleeding, but the shiner developing around his left eye was getting uglier by the minute.

“No. That’s all right.”

“Thanks for the cigarette.”

“You’re welcome.”

I finished off the cigarette, dropped it to the damp pavement, and squished it with my shoe. I didn’t want him to go. I wanted to talk to him some more, a lot more. Back then I often felt as if I was having a conversation with myself whenever I was talking to a boy. They would sometimes talk over me about something completely different, like sports. I was always disappointed, wanting to know what it was about me that was wrong, thinking that Christina was right, that maybe I really was too mouthy and weird. But I liked talking to Patrick despite what people were saying about him, especially since I knew how wrong they were about him, and that he listened to what I said. I also believed something was wrong with the world for stigmatizing someone who was clearly so demoralized that he didn’t even have the energy to offer up a defense of himself.

“I’d be happy to share a cigarette with you some other time,” I said.

He nodded. “Okay.”

“Good.”

“I’ll see you later.”

“When?”

“When my suspension is over. They gave me two days out. Now I either have to pretend to go to school everyday or make up a different reason for getting suspended than this.” He held up his nearly finished cigarette. “I don’t want my grandparents finding out I smoke.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks.” He headed past the empty stump. My parents had the tree cut down the previous summer, after it’s roots broke through the sewer line for the second time. I walked up the driveway and went into my house.

Patrick and I would share many more cigarettes and many more conversations. I needed a brother I could relate to, and he needed a sister. So when we eventually shared a few kisses, they did not have the spark necessary to carry on a romantic relationship. Meanwhile, I would find out where that aura of defeat came from: the death of his parents and younger sister in an automobile accident with a drunk driver the summer before, an accident in which Patrick was the only survivor. That’s how he had come to live with his father’s parents. By the time we kissed, he had shaken off that aura and made more than a few friends. After graduation Patrick went to U. of I. in Champaign-Urbana and I went to Oberlin in Ohio. Through the years Patrick and I have managed to keep in touch. He’s now a professor of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota with a wife and a toddler.

Ken did come back, after nearly two full years, but only to visit. (He still lives in L.A.) This was followed by a glacier-paced reconciliation with our parents. During that process I began to understand my parents’ exasperation and grief at Ken, and the self-doubts they had had about their own skills as parents. Ken had managed to hurt all of us. The looks and feelings in my family that centered around Ken’s actions bore a striking resemblance to those of my clients’ family members. Though pity often tinges their feelings, the dichotomy is almost always the same: unwilling guilt and distancing anger. The latter is what Scott exhibits; he is insistent that the guilt be Ken’s. This insistence sometimes leads to a morally-driven obtuseness that I have defended to Ken and our parents by saying that it’s good we have someone like him in our family. It makes the three of us Post kids fit together. Ken tries to see what he can get away with, Scott tries to stick to only what’s allowed, and I try to find the middle ground that’s most fair for everyone.

It was well after midnight and I was tired when I came to the end of my story, my faulty attempt at constructing a case for my brother; this document. My glass was empty. I had to get to bed so I could be as rested as I could for the beginning of the trial later that day. As I rinsed out my glass in the sink and set it next to my plate and utensils, I no longer felt anger at Scott and I knew how to answer him. The next time I see him I’m going to say, It’s not my job to pronounce Ken’s guilt. I’m not Ken’s judge. I’m his sister, just as I’m your sister.