The Easy One

"That's Elias's," Mrs. Hallett said. "He did it when he was twelve. I keep it in the hall."

It hung beside the coat rack in a dime-store frame, a pencil drawing of a fat orange cat asleep on a porch rail. Every whisker had been drawn separately. In the corner, in careful child's capitals, someone had signed it E. VOSS.

Jose stood in front of it with his hands in his pockets because he didn't trust them.

"Biscuit," she said. "Dead nine years. The boy gave me a better likeness of that cat than the vet got on an X-ray."

She was seventy-eight and had lived across Tamarack Street from the Voss house for forty-one years. She'd made coffee they hadn't asked for and put out a plate of shortbread nobody touched. Rainer sat on the porch glider with a mug balanced on his knee. He hadn't said anything since hello. The three-hour drive had taken them through four towns on back roads in a Corolla Rainer had borrowed from a man who didn't ask questions, and for most of it neither of them had spoken either.

"You boys came back," Mrs. Hallett said. "Maggie told me you wouldn't."

"I'm trying to put some things in order," Jose said. "About the house. About the years after I left. Did anything strike you, when Elias died? Did anyone stop coming around?"

She thought about it with her whole face, the way old people do when they take a question seriously.

"There was a man," she said. "Sundays, for years. Camel coat. He'd park a good car out front and bring Maggie a bottle, the kind with a cork. She called him her friend from the bank." She tapped the arm of her chair. "He stopped after the funeral. I assumed he'd died."

Jose looked past her through the screen door.

Rainer's thumb had been moving in his pocket since they'd sat down. Back and forth over whatever he kept there. At the words *camel coat* it stopped.

Jose watched it stop.

He had been watching for it all morning. He'd told himself he wouldn't know it when he saw it. He knew it. It wasn't a flinch or a tell. It was the opposite of one. A man going completely still, hand and mouth and mug, like someone who has heard his name called in a crowded room and decided not to turn around.

"Do you remember his name?" Jose asked.

"Oh, honey, no. Victor. Or Vincent." She waved it away. "I never liked him. He wiped his feet too carefully."

Rainer set the mug down on the glider arm. "Mrs. Hallett, this was good coffee."

"You haven't touched it."

"I know. It was good coffee."

She looked at him a long moment. Something moved across her face, an old sorrow with a familiar address.

"You remember the pills," she said.

"Mrs. Hallett," Rainer said.

"Which pills?" Jose asked.

"Ellen's." She turned to him. "After her hip. Forty Percocet in the kitchen cabinet, and I'd gone and left the back door unlocked like a fool. Rainer was at my door at seven in the morning with the bottle in his hand. Empty. He said, *I took them, Mrs. Hallett, I'm sorry.*"

"He was sixteen," Jose said slowly.

"Nineteen. Elias was thirteen." She said it gently. "I knew he hadn't. A boy who swallows forty of those isn't standing on a porch at seven, apologizing. I said, honey, who really took them? And he said, me. Just me. And then Elias came around the hedge, white as paper, and you were standing at the end of the walk with your backpack on."

Jose didn't remember the backpack. He remembered nothing about that morning at all.

"You were looking at your shoes," Mrs. Hallett said. "I remember because I thought, that boy knows exactly what happened and has decided he doesn't."

"I was seventeen."

"I know you were. I'm not accusing you. I'm telling you what a porch sees." She turned back to Rainer, and her voice got rougher. "Ellen's husband was on the force then. He had you in the juvenile hold for two nights. I've been sorry about that for twenty years."

"It was a long weekend," Rainer said. "I've had worse."

"That's not the point, is it."

Rainer stood and picked up the mug and put it carefully on the tray. His hands were steady. Jose noticed that too.

---

Ruth Calloway lived on the third floor of a senior building with a view of a parking structure. Her oxygen tank stood beside her armchair like a patient dog. At eighty she still sat the way social workers do, forward, hands folded, ready to be told something worth writing down.

"Mr. Alvarez," she said. "I wondered which of you would come first."

"I'd like to ask about the file."

"I don't have the file. The county has the file, and the county has lost the file." She considered him. "I have my memory, and I have a rule about it. You want the truth or the kind version?"

"The truth."

"I wrote you down as the easy one."

Jose let that sit.

"Honor roll. *Yes ma'am, no ma'am.* You never missed a visit. I had forty-one children that year, Mr. Alvarez, and I gave my hours to the ones who set fires." Her voice stayed mild. "That was my mistake. The easy ones leave. They leave so politely nobody notices there's a draft."

"I wasn't leaving."

"You left rooms. By seventeen you did it every time Elias got bad. He'd be climbing the walls and you'd have a library card." She tipped her head. "I asked you once where you were, during one of his nights. You said, *I'm saving myself for exams.* You said it like a man protecting an investment."

"I was a kid."

"You were. So was he." She let a beat go by. "Rainer stayed in the room. Every time. I never could decide whether that made him the better brother or the worse one."

Beside him, Rainer was looking at the carpet.

"I wrote it in my notes in your last year," Ruth said. "*Jose is leaving before he leaves.* I underlined it. Nobody ever called me back about it."

Jose stood. His legs had gone somewhere without him. "Thank you for your time."

"You asked for the truth, dear."

"I know." He found the door handle. "I did."

---

The house had been torn down in 2014 after a fire. Now it was a rectangle of weeds behind a chain-link fence, with a mattress folded against one post and a shopping cart on its side. Jose stood at the fence with his fingers through the links. He'd designed a hospital wing once and a three-story library. He'd never in his life known how to read what a lot like this was telling him.

Rainer stood a few feet off, lighting a cigarette he didn't smoke. He just held it.

"You knew about the man," Jose said.

"I know a lot of men."

"You stopped moving."

"I was thinking about shortbread."

"Rainer."

"Not here." He said it quietly, not looking at him. "Not on this ground. Ask me anywhere else."

An engine slowed on the road behind them. Jose heard it before he saw it, a truck with a bad muffler, easing along the curb. It stopped. A door opened.

"Well, Christ," a man's voice said. "Rainer Voss."

He was somewhere in his forties, thick through the middle, a baseball cap pulled low. He had the loose friendliness of someone who has just had a thought he likes. He came across the gravel with a hand half out.

"Tommy Brandt. You remember. The Brandts, over on Fifth." He grinned. "I owe your old lady money, don't I? Eight thousand. I keep meaning to get it to her."

"Eight thousand and change," Rainer said.

"Thing is, she's not going to be around to collect much longer, is she." Tommy spread his hands, sympathetic, regretful. "And hell, I heard about your little brother. Heard he finally went out the way everybody figured. Probably saved the family a fortune in rehab, honestly."

Jose had a sentence ready. He never got to say it.

Rainer was already moving. There was no sound to it. He crossed the three feet of gravel and hit Tommy Brandt in the mouth, once, and then again before the man had finished falling. Tommy hit the side of his own truck and went down, and Rainer was on him, one knee on his chest, a forearm across his throat.

"Rainer." Jose caught his collar. "Rainer."

His fist came back a third time.

Jose got both arms around his shoulders and hauled. Rainer weighed more than he'd expected. It was like pulling a car off a curb. Jose's heels skidded on the gravel and they went over backward together, Rainer on top of him, rigid, panting, his bandaged hand a mess of red where the gauze had split.

"Look at me. Look at me."

Rainer looked. His face was blank. It wasn't rage. Jose had seen rage, he knew its heat. This had no heat in it at all. It was the face of a man standing on the bottom of something.

"He said it," Rainer whispered. "He said it about him."

"I know."

"He said it like it was *nothing.*"

"I know. I know. Stop."

Behind them Tommy Brandt was laughing.

It was a wet, coughing, bloody laugh. He had rolled onto his side and was spitting a tooth into the gravel. He pushed himself up on one elbow and pointed, grinning with a red mouth, toward the cab of the truck.

On the dashboard, propped against the windshield, sat a phone. Its screen was lit. A small red dot blinked in the corner of the frame.

"Smile," Tommy said.

Jose let go of Rainer.

"Lady gave me two hundred and a number," Tommy said, wiping his chin. "Said if any of the Voss boys ever came sniffing around, I should keep my phone running and get a good clip. Said there's five hundred more in it if it comes out clean." He spat again. "That came out real clean."

"What lady?"

"Didn't leave a name. Nice voice, though." He grinned wider, and the blood ran into the gaps in his teeth. "She said you'd come eventually. She said you wouldn't be able to help yourselves."

Jose climbed to his feet. He crossed to the truck and leaned in through the open door and picked up the phone. The video had stopped. A progress bar sat at the bottom of the screen, full, with a small green check beside it.

*Sent to: C*

One letter. No number.

Behind him, Rainer had gotten to his knees on the gravel. He was looking down at his hands. The bandages Jose had taped were soaked through, and the blood on them wasn't all his.

"She knew we'd come here," Rainer said. He sounded almost curious. "She knew exactly which ones I'd hit."

Jose held the phone in his palm and read the single letter over and over, and he thought about the garment bag on the floor, the lamp left on, the warm hand on his wrist counting.

*I'd like to take the thing you're frightened of, and hold it.*

She had never needed his phone. She'd only needed Rainer's.