My brother laughed with his squad when my shirt caught above my scarred back.
“You should’ve stayed home,” he said, while I tried to pull it down.
Then our general entered the changing room, and the man I’d begged to stop laughing had to hear why I’d come back.
I’d signed up knowing strangers might doubt me; I hadn’t prepared for my brother to help them.
Beau knew I’d spent months learning to sleep without lying on my back.
He still laughed.
When I arrived at Fort Redstone, he wouldn’t introduce me as his sister until someone asked.
“Erica,” he said, “don’t expect me to carry you through this.”
I hadn’t asked him to.
But I stood beside him while he explained which exercises I probably wouldn’t finish.
Griffin listened with his arms folded, then moved my sandbag aside from the row.
“That one’s FULL,” he said.
“I can see that.”
He left it where he’d put it, so I had to walk around him to collect it.
Beau could’ve moved aside.
Instead, he asked whether I wanted him to find something lighter before everybody had to wait.
I carried it back myself.
Before that first week finished, they didn’t bother lowering their voices when I passed.
Griffin would call for help with the cleaning whenever I asked to join a harder exercise.
Beau would tell me to save my breath for running.
I kept asking anyway.
Sometimes the answer came before I’d finished speaking, and sometimes they let me start just to count my mistakes aloud.
The changing room happened after a run.
I’d used the screened corner, but my exercise shirt had rolled up under itself as I pulled it over my head.
I stepped out before I’d worked the fabric loose.
Griffin stopped talking.
Then Beau leaned sideways to see what he’d been staring at, and I reached behind myself.
The hem wouldn’t move.
“Well, that explains the complaints,” Griffin said.
I hadn’t complained.
My brother laughed through his nose, and that little sound hurt worse than the words that followed.
“You should’ve stayed home.”
“Beau, stop.”
He glanced toward Griffin instead of answering me, as though he’d been asked a question by somebody else.
Griffin pointed at my back.
“What happened, did somebody drag you down the road?”
“Leave it.”
That came out badly.
My fingers kept missing the fold in my shirt, and Beau told me to quit making a production of it.
I got the fabric down.
Then my legs folded under me beside the bench, and I couldn’t stop the tears.
The bench had a screw that caught my sleeve when I tried to turn away.
I pulled until it let go.
Above me, Griffin said I couldn’t take a joke, and my brother made another sound that might’ve been agreement.
The door opened behind him.
General Rosales stood inside it, still holding the handle, while Beau finished what he was saying.
Nobody warned him.
The general waited until my brother turned around.
“Repeat that.”
Beau straightened so quickly his heel struck the bench.
“We were just talking, sir.”
“Then you can repeat it.”
Griffin lowered his hand.
I pressed my sleeve against my cheek and tried to get up before the general could ask why I was sitting there.
He came toward me instead.
“Stay where you are, soldier.”
Beau started explaining that we were family, that we talked like this, that it hadn’t meant anything.
I kept my face turned.
“She’s my sister, sir.”
“And that gave you permission?”
“No, sir.”
The general stopped beside the bench, close enough that I could see the dust along his trouser seam.
“Did you ask her about those marks?”
Beau looked at me then.
For eight years, he’d asked whether they hurt, whether another operation would help, whether I wanted them covered.
He’d never asked about the building.
“She was caught in an attack,” he said.
“She went back inside.”
Griffin lifted his head.
The general held out his hand, but I couldn’t make myself take it yet.
“She was seventeen,” he said.
“She had no equipment. There were children still in there.”
My brother’s mouth opened.
The general kept going before he could put anything into it.
“She brought three out. When our people reached her, she couldn’t stand.”
I rubbed my palms against my trousers.
I’d heard the children coughing for so many nights afterward that I used to sleep with the television on.
Nobody in that room knew that.
“Those marks came from keeping them underneath her when the roof started coming apart.”
Beau stared at the fabric covering my shoulder.
“And you stood here and made her sit on the floor.”
“Sir, I didn’t KNOW.”
“YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO KNOW.”
My brother took a step toward me, then stopped when I pulled my elbow against my side.
The general offered his hand again.
This time I took it, and he waited while I found my feet.
Griffin tried to apologize before I was upright.
“Let her stand,” the general said.
He didn’t tell them I was better than they were, or ask me to forgive anybody.
He told them the next exercise would include everybody assigned to it.
Then he faced me.
“Report with your squad tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir.”
Beau stayed beside the bench while I walked out, and I left without waiting for him.
The next morning, my sandbag was still in the line.
Nobody offered to replace it.
I finished behind some of them and ahead of others, with Beau close enough to hear me breathing.
He didn’t count my mistakes.
Griffin stopped calling me over whenever something needed cleaning, though he could barely manage to look directly at me.
I didn’t help him with that.
When his ankle turned on a daytime march, I got beneath his arm and brought him back.
He kept saying he could manage.
“Then put your foot down.”
He tried, and his arm settled harder across my shoulders.
Nineteen days after the changing room, we went out for a night exercise in rain that knocked the hurdles over.
My sleeves stayed heavy against my wrists.
Beau fell during the return stretch and stayed down while the rest of us stumbled around him.
Somebody behind me said to keep moving.
I went back.
His hands slid when he tried to push himself up, and I caught his sleeve before his face reached the mud again.
“Leave me, Erica.”
“Get your knee underneath you.”
“I CAN’T.”
“Then lean here.”
He put his weight against me, and we moved until another shoulder came under his other arm.
We reached the finish together.
After that, Beau started saving me a place beside him without making a joke about it.
I took it when I wanted.
Near the end of training, an alarm sent us toward a convoy that had been attacked outside the base.
By then, they followed my directions without checking who else had heard them.
During the fighting, Beau went down near me.
I dropped across him when another blast hit, and his hand caught the back of my uniform.
“Stay DOWN,” I said.
He listened.
We got back through the gate with dust in our mouths and people who couldn’t walk without help.
General Rosales stood beside the entrance.
I started to report, but he raised his hand and saluted me before I could finish.
Beside the gate
I returned his salute.
My hand shook on the way down.
There was grit between my teeth, and I was trying not to cough directly at a general.
Training had covered several emergencies. That particular one had escaped the syllabus.
“You brought your people back,” he said.
“Not by myself, sir.”
“No. Tell me who needs help.”
I pointed out the soldiers who needed attention first.
Beau stood beside me, one hand still pressed against his side.
He could walk now, though every few steps he stopped pretending it was comfortable.
Rosales faced me again.
“Can you give your account?”
“She’s all right, sir,” Beau said. “She’s sturdier than she looks.”
I stepped around him.
“I can answer.”
His hand lifted toward my elbow, then dropped.
The general waited for me.
I gave him the number who’d come through with us and what I could say about the people still being checked.
I stopped where my own knowledge stopped.
Beau kept opening his mouth.
When I finished, General Rosales said he’d hear the sequence from us once everyone had been checked and we’d had water.
I wanted that water badly enough to resent every additional syllable.
Beau reached for the bottle someone passed me.
“I’ll open it.”
“I’ve got it.”
He let go, but his smile stayed in place.
Griffin stood on my other side, looking from my face to my brother’s.
“You should’ve seen her out there, sir,” Beau said.
The general was already speaking to another soldier.
Beau said it again, more quietly, to those around us.
I drank. Water ran down my wrist.
A few weeks earlier, my brother couldn’t introduce me without a warning.
Now he kept saying my name.
“That’s my sister,” he said.
The bottle between us
That afternoon, while we waited to be called back together, Beau sat beside me outside the changing room.
He put the water bottle between our boots.
“You’re supposed to keep drinking.”
“So are you.”
“I am.”
“Then stop supervising mine.”
He took a drink.
Even that looked like a concession he expected somebody to record.
I was twenty-five. Beau was twenty-eight.
Those three years had given him, in his own estimation, the experience necessary to manage a small country and one sister.
His knee touched mine.
“I thought you were gone out there.”
“I’m here.”
“I couldn’t see your face. You were across me, and I couldn’t get you to move.”
“You were pulling my uniform.”
“I know.”
He rubbed his palms together. Dirt came away in flakes.
I wanted to put my head on his shoulder.
That was the embarrassing part.
After everything, there was still a part of me that wanted my brother to put an arm around me and be my brother without an audience.
Instead, I passed him the bottle.
Before I signed up, he’d sat beside me once while I worked through the exercises that kept my back moving.
I’d lost count, and he started counting for me.
When I told him I could manage, he’d said, “Let me do something.” I’d let him.
Three weeks later, he was telling people which exercises I wouldn’t finish.
Now he nudged my boot.
“We did all right.”
“Some of us can’t walk yet.”
“You know what I mean.”
I did. I wanted him to say it without tidying the day first.
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
“When we go in, I’ll start. You can fill in anything I miss.”
“Why would you start?”
“Because you’re worn out.”
“So are you.”
“I’ve been here longer, Erica. I know how to keep it short.”
From inside came the sound of Griffin moving the bench.
It scraped, stopped, scraped again. That bench had more determination than comfort.
Beau followed my eyes to the door.
“He’s making room.”
“For what?”
“For everybody. Rosales said he’d come here.”
I stood. Beau reached up as though to help, then remembered my elbow at the gate.
“I can give my own account,” I said.
“Of course.”
He stood beside me, brushing his trousers.
Then he put his hand on the door.
“Just let me get us started.”
My part of the report
Later that afternoon, Beau stood at the end of the bench while the rest of us waited for General Rosales.
Griffin had moved it away from the wall.
The screw that had caught my sleeve was still there.
I sat at the other end.
Beau stayed on his feet.
He’d always liked standing when he had something to explain.
It made everyone else look as though they’d come to his meeting.
“We should get the order straight,” he said.
That sounded sensible. I gave him the first point where our group had changed direction.
He nodded.
“Right. We moved them back from there.”
“I told them to move back.”
“That’s what I said.”
“No.”
Griffin bent over his boot.
Beau glanced toward the door.
“I’m not taking anything away from you.”
“Then use the words.”
He put his hands on his hips.
“Erica told us to move back. Better?”
“Accurate.”
One soldier shifted his feet. Beau’s face changed a little.
He could take correction alone, sometimes.
In company, it became an injury somebody had done to him.
He started again.
This time he put me into the account.
He gave me so much of it that I had to stop him a second time.
“Griffin brought the last man through.”
“You were directing him.”
“He still did it.”
“I’m trying to give you credit.”
“Give him his.”
Griffin looked up.
“I got him to the gate,” he said.
“Erica told me where to go.”
“Fine,” Beau said. “That’s what we’ll say.”
I put my palms on my knees.
“You can say what you did. I’ll say what I did.”
My brother looked at the others, waiting for the ordinary little smile that used to follow anything I said too firmly.
Nobody gave him one.
So he tried affection.
“She’s been like this since we were kids. Ask her the time, she’ll correct the clock.”
That got a breath from somebody. Not quite a laugh.
I knew that line.
He used to say it when I corrected him about whose turn it was to wash dishes.
In this room it gave him a way to put me back in my childhood bedroom.
“I’m asking you not to answer for me.”
“And I’m agreeing with you.”
He said it as though I was making him repeat a reasonable offer.
Griffin pulled his boot tight.
“Maybe we should just let her start.”
For a second, I could have hugged him.
Beau moved away from the end of the bench.
“Absolutely. That’s fine. Erica starts.”
He gave me an open-handed gesture, the sort used to show a visitor where to stand.
I stayed seated.
The men settled around us.
I put the sequence together in my head, keeping to what I’d seen. No guessing.
No making myself useful in places where somebody else had done the work.
Beau leaned against the wall.
“And afterward,” he said, “we can put the rest behind us.”
Griffin’s boot
In the same room, Griffin stopped working at his laces.
“What rest?” I said.
Beau looked tired of me before he answered.
“You know what. The rough start. All that.”
“All that.”
“Don’t do the repeating thing.”
I pressed my heel against the floor.
My leg wanted to bounce, and I wasn’t giving it permission.
He kept going.
“I was wrong about what you could handle. You proved that. Everybody here knows it.”
One soldier nodded.
I could have accepted that sentence.
A month earlier, I would have carried it around for days.
But Beau wasn’t finished.
“I was hard on you because I knew what this place would be like. Better from me than from somebody who didn’t care.”
Griffin looked down again.
“Is that what you thought?” I asked him.
He took too long.
“At first,” he said.
“And now?”
“We were out of line.”
“Which part?”
He rubbed a thumb over the toe of his boot.
“Erica.”
Just my name, with a request attached to it.
Please don’t make me say the thing we both remember.
Beau came away from the wall.
“He said we were out of line. What else do you need?”
I turned to Griffin.
“When you moved my sandbag, were you helping me?”
“No.”
“When you sent me to clean instead of letting me try?”
“No.”
Beau lifted a hand.
“Nobody’s arguing.”
Griffin spoke before I could.
“I thought Beau was looking out for you. He knew you. I didn’t.”
There it was.
I’d brought Griffin back with his arm across my shoulders.
Since then, he’d passed me equipment without a comment and listened when I spoke.
I’d mistaken that for something settled.
Now he was lending my brother a reason.
Beau took it.
“Exactly. They didn’t know you.”
“They knew what you told them.”
“I told them you’d been hurt.”
“You told them what I wouldn’t finish.”
His mouth pressed shut. Griffin’s foot slid beneath the bench.
I wanted somebody to say, without being dragged to it, that laughing at a person on the floor hadn’t required a complicated background check.
Instead, someone said, “We’ve all been through a lot today.”
We had. That was true, which made it useful.
Beau crouched in front of me.
“I was scared,” he said.
“Before you got here. During the storm. Today. You think I liked seeing you out there?”
“No.”
“Then give me a little room.”
His hand rested beside mine on the bench. He didn’t touch me.
This was closer to the brother I’d wanted outside.
I could hear him breathing.
He was trying, in the way he knew how, to get me back on his side.
But he still wanted the room to believe that fear had made him laugh.
I moved my hand.
He stood too quickly.
“For God’s sake, Erica. I said you did well.”
The door opened. General Rosales stepped inside.
Beau straightened.
“We were just getting ready, sir.”
Rosales looked toward me.
My brother added, “She’s a little overwhelmed.”
The end of the bench
General Rosales stayed beside the door that afternoon, and my brother stood between us.
“Do you need time?” the general asked me.
I did.
I needed enough time to be tired without Beau using it as evidence.
Enough time to stop hearing overwhelmed as a nicer version of the words he’d used when I was on the floor.
“A minute, sir.”
“Take it.”
Beau picked up the bottle and handed it to me.
I wanted to throw it at the wall. I drank instead.
My body had very inconvenient loyalties.
It needed water even when the person offering it was making me furious.
Beau turned to the general.
“I can start with what I saw.”
Rosales nodded.
My brother gave a clear account of his part.
He kept to where he’d been and what he’d done.
When he reached the place where he’d gone down, he stopped.
Then he looked at me.
“She came back for me.”
My fingers tightened around the bottle.
“She told me to stay down, and I did. I couldn’t have got through that gate without her.”
Nobody moved.
That was what I’d wanted him to say.
It should have been enough for that minute.
He faced the general again.
“She’s always been stubborn. I tried to talk her out of coming here. I figured she’d done enough already, after what happened when she was seventeen.”
I put the bottle down.
“But she doesn’t listen to me,” he said. “Never has.”
There was a softness in his voice that made the account worse.
He could tell this story for the rest of our lives.
The worried brother. The determined sister.
His fear, her courage, and the whole ugly beginning polished into something people could smile about.
Griffin folded his arms.
The same pose as the morning he’d moved my sandbag.
I tried to start.
“When I arrived—”
Beau turned.
“I’m saying I was wrong.”
My tongue stuck against the roof of my mouth.
“About what?”
“About you being ready.”
Rosales studied my brother, then me.
Beau spread his hands.
“I don’t know what else to say. I’ve told everybody she saved me. I’ve said it in front of you, sir. I’ll say it to anybody who asks.”
My eyes filled.
I hated that. I’d kept men moving outside the gate.
Now my brother had managed to get me crying beside that bench again, and all he’d needed was a version of events that sounded generous.
He reached for my shoulder.
“Sit back. You’re exhausted.”
I was already sitting.
His hand stopped.
Nobody laughed, but nobody corrected him either.
For a moment, I let my head drop.
Beau turned toward the general, ready to finish.
Griffin shifted toward the door as though our part was nearly done.
I had my place in the squad. My sandbag stayed in the row.
They’d followed my directions.
And I was one nod away from letting my brother tell them that he’d helped me get there.
“She’ll be all right after some sleep,” he said.
I lifted my head.
“Stay, Griffin.”
His hand came off the door.
Where Beau stood
That afternoon, with Griffin still beside the door, I moved halfway along the bench.
I put both feet on the floor.
“Beau. Where were you standing?”
He looked down at me.
“When?”
“The day my shirt got stuck.”
“Erica, we’ve been through that.”
“Where?”
He glanced at the general.
Rosales said nothing.
Beau pointed to the end of the bench.
“There. I think.”
“You were there. Griffin was beside you.”
Griffin took a step back into the room.
My brother rubbed his forehead.
“What do you want me to do? Stand there again?”
“No. Stay where you are.”
I didn’t want him performing anything.
I wanted him to stop moving the memory somewhere easier.
“What did I ask you?”
He stared at me.
“That day. Before I sat on the floor.”
“You asked me to stop.”
“And did you?”
“No.”
It came out without the careful voice he’d been using for the general.
I held on to that.
The salute at the gate had given Beau an ending he could live with.
He could be proud of me now. He could tell everybody.
He could say he’d worried, and point to me standing there as proof that things had worked out.
I hadn’t agreed to that ending.
“When you went down in the rain,” I said, “what did you ask me?”
His eyes closed.
“To leave me.”
“Did I?”
“No.”
“And today?”
“I didn’t ask you to come back today.”
“I know.”
He looked at Griffin. Griffin stayed where he was.
I was done asking whether I’d been good enough to deserve a place beside them.
There was a different question, and Beau was the one who could answer it.
“If I’d listened to you in this room, would I have been there?”
His hand covered his mouth.
I waited.
“Stay home”
Beau lowered his hand.
“No.”
The word came out so quietly that he said it again.
“No. You wouldn’t.”
I left him room to continue.
He looked around at the men who’d laughed with him.
A few looked back.
One stared at the floor until Beau said his name, then lifted his head.
“I told her she should’ve stayed home.”
Nobody offered him a better way to put it.
“I said it here. When she couldn’t get her shirt down.”
Griffin sat on the end of the bench.
Beau kept standing.
“I knew she’d been hurt. I knew how long she’d been trying to get back to doing things. I didn’t know about the children, but I knew the rest.”
His eyes came back to mine.
“You’d asked me to stop, and I looked at him.”
Griffin rubbed both hands over his face.
“I kept going,” Beau said.
“I could see you were upset. I still kept going.”
I wanted to ask him why.
Eight years of being his sister while he worried about operations and shirts, followed by those weeks when he acted as though I was something he’d found attached to his boot.
But I didn’t need an answer he could improve while I waited.
“Tell them about the exercises.”
He swallowed.
“I made it sound like you’d hold everybody up.”
“Did I?”
“No.”
“Did you know whether I would?”
“No. You hadn’t done them.”
Griffin stood.
“I moved her bag before she touched it,” he said.
“I sent her to clean because I didn’t want her slowing us down.”
Beau turned toward him.
“And I let you.”
“You helped.”
My brother’s face folded.
There was the cost he hadn’t expected.
Griffin had followed his lead when it was easy.
Now he wouldn’t let Beau stand one step away from what they’d done.
“I helped,” Beau said.
Someone against the wall spoke.
“I counted the mistakes.”
Another said, “I laughed.”
I looked at each of them.
I made myself do it, even though the easiest place to look was the floor.
General Rosales stayed at the door.
No speech arrived to cover the sound of men admitting ordinary, mean things.
No one got to turn it into an inspiring afternoon.
Beau sat down opposite me.
“I thought if I was the first one to say it, they’d stop looking at me like I was supposed to do something about you being here.”
He rubbed his hands on his trousers.
“That sounds bad.”
I didn’t help him.
“It is bad,” he said.
Griffin moved away from the bench, giving us space without leaving the room.
My brother tried again.
“I liked being somebody here before you came. They asked me things. Then you arrived, and I kept thinking they’d expect me to look after you. I didn’t want that.”
My throat hurt.
“You could’ve said that to me.”
“I know.”
“You said it to everybody else.”
“I know.”
He bent forward, and for a moment all I could see was the top of his head.
Then he lifted it.
“I’m sorry I laughed at your back. I’m sorry I told you to go home. You asked me to stop, and I chose them.”
The tears came again.
I wiped them with my sleeve and stayed on the bench.
This time nobody offered to remove me from the room.
Beau’s own eyes were wet.
He tried to smile at me, out of habit, then let the attempt go.
“I can’t make that sound any better.”
“No.”
“I want you to know I’m proud of you.”
“You can be.”
His face lifted.
“But don’t use it to answer for me.”
He nodded.
I turned toward General Rosales.
“I can give my account now, sir.”
“Go ahead.”
I started where my own part began.
Beau opened his mouth once. Then he closed it.
When I reached Griffin bringing the last man through, I turned to him.
He gave the part I’d been unable to see.
I picked up where we’d met again.
We finished without my brother correcting a word.
The general asked Beau one question about his position before he’d gone down.
Beau answered only that.
Then Rosales faced the room.
“When she spoke out there, you listened.”
“Yes, sir,” Griffin said.
“Keep doing that in here.”
He left us to finish getting ourselves together.
Beau stayed seated while the others moved.
The place at the end of the bench, where he’d stood to give everybody the approved version, stayed empty.
Griffin picked up the bottle and handed it to me.
“I owe you an apology that doesn’t mention him.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry. For the bag. For the cleaning. For what I said about your back.”
I nodded once. That was all I had for him yet.
Beau stood when I did.
“Can we talk outside? Just us?”
I wanted my brother.
I also wanted ten minutes when nobody needed anything from me.
“You can wait.”
The screened corner
The next morning, I went back into the changing room with a clean exercise shirt.
I stopped just inside the door.
Griffin was crouched beside the bench.
He’d borrowed something to tighten the screw that had caught my sleeve.
“It stuck out,” he said.
“I remember.”
“I should’ve fixed it then.”
“Yes.”
He gave it another turn and ran the edge of his sleeve over it.
The fabric passed without catching.
That was one thing done.
He stood and moved aside.
My bag was where I’d left it.
Nobody had put it somewhere more convenient for anybody who might have to walk around it.
Beau came in behind me.
He stopped far enough away that I didn’t have to move.
“Morning.”
“Morning.”
He looked at the screen, then at the shirt in my hand.
“I’ll wait outside.”
“All right.”
No reaching for the shirt. No suggestion that I sit down.
He went through the door, and Griffin followed.
I stood alone for a few seconds.
Then I changed.
My back pulled when I lifted my arms. It did that sometimes.
I lowered them, tried again, and got the shirt over my head.
The hem rolled under itself.
I nearly laughed.
Of all the things a piece of cotton could do, it had selected the one performance for which I had no remaining patience.
I worked my fingers under the fold, pulled one side loose, then the other.
It took longer than it should have.
Nobody called through the door.
Nobody asked whether I needed something easier to wear.
I came out from behind the screen and sat on the bench to tie my boots.
The sleeve slid over the repaired screw.
Outside, Beau was waiting with the rest of them.
There was a place beside him.
I walked to it because I wanted to.
He kept his hands to himself.
“I told Griffin I won’t be giving your side of things again,” he said.
“He can ask me.”
“That’s what I told him.”
We started toward the training ground.
For a while, my brother matched his steps to mine without pointing it out.
Then he slowed, and I slowed with him. His side still hurt.
He didn’t try to hide it once I looked over.
“Need a minute?”
“Yes.”
We stopped.
The others went a few steps farther before Griffin turned.
“We’ll wait up here,” he said.
Beau leaned forward with his hands on his knees.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You said that.”
“I’ll probably say it again.”
I looked toward the row of sandbags.
Mine stood among the others, as ordinary as a bag of sand had every right to be.
“I don’t want to spend every morning in that room.”
“Neither do I.”
“Then don’t put me back there.”
He straightened.
“I won’t.”
I wasn’t ready to give him everything he wanted from that answer. He didn’t ask.
When we reached the bags, Griffin stepped around mine to get his own.
Beau stood beside me.
“Want a hand?”
I looked at him.
He waited, then added, “I’m asking.”
“Not with this.”
“All right.”
I lifted my bag. He lifted his.
The weight settled, and the shirt pulled tight across my shoulders.
For once I didn’t reach behind myself to check what anybody could see.
Beau started forward, then stopped when I stayed where I was.
“What?”
I shifted the bag.
“You’re on my sleeve.”
He looked down. A fold of fabric was trapped beneath the edge of his load where we’d stood too close together.
“Oh.”
He moved at once.
I pulled free, and a laugh escaped me before I could stop it.
My brother looked at my face.
“Can I laugh at that?”
“Yes, you idiot.”
He did.
I knocked my shoulder against his and stepped into line.
If this one stayed with you, send it to someone who’s had to ask their own family to let them speak.
For more family tensions and unexpected turns, see the sewing cabinet dispute, the uncle who saved a seat, and the chairs my ex gave away.
