Bridge of Clay

Rosy was sixteen years old when finally she couldn’t walk anymore, and all of us carried her off. At the vet it was Rory, believe it or not, who said, “I think she was holding out—waiting, you know?” He looked at the wall and swallowed. She was named for the sky and Penelope, that dog. “I think she was waiting for Clay.”

It’s only Achilles, in Silver, still alive now.

That mule is likely unkillable.

Tommy lives near the museum.

* * *

—

Then Henry.

Well, what would you guess for Henry? I wonder.

What to expect from brother number three?

He was the first of us to be married, and would always come up smiling. He went, of course, into real estate, but not before making a packet—on betting and all he’d collected.

During one of his Epic Books and Music Sales, a girl walked her dog up Archer Street. Her name was Cleo Fitzpatrick. For some people life just sails like that, and Henry is one such case.

“Oi!” he’d called, and first she ignored him, in cutoff shorts and a shirt. “Oi, girl with the Corgi-cross-shih tzu, or whatever it is!”

She put in a fresh piece of gum.

“It’s a kelpie, dickhead—” but I was there, it was easy to see. It appeared in her black earthy eyes. Fittingly, she bought a copy of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, and came back the following week. They were married the following year.

* * *

—

As for Rory, strange as it seems, he’s the one closest to our father again, and goes out quite

a lot to the bridge. He’s still as rough as guts—or rough as bags, as people like Mrs. Chilman would say—and the years have taken the edge off, and I know how he always missed Clay.

It wasn’t long after old Mrs. Chilman died, actually, that he moved to a suburb close by: Somerville, ten minutes north. He likes to come back and sit here, though, drinking beer, and laughing away. He likes Claudia, too, and talks to her, but mostly it’s him and me. We talk about Clay, we talk about Penny, and the story is passed between us:

“So they gave her six months—a hundred-and-eighty-odd days. Did they have any fucking clue who they were dealing with?”

Like the rest of them, he knows what happened now, in the backyard that bright-lit morning; how our father couldn’t do it, but Clay was somehow able. He knows what happened beyond it, with Carey and The Surrounds; yet, inevitably, we always come back to it—when she told us, in here, in the kitchen.

“What’d Clay say about that night?” he asks, and he waits a few beats for the answer.

“He said that you roared the fire in his eyes.”

And Rory will smile, every time. “I pulled him from out of that chair you’re in.”

“I know,” I say, “I remember.”

* * *

—

And me?

Well, I did it.

It only took me several months, but I’d been reading Penelope’s books—her immigrant Everests—and opening Waldek’s letter; I’d memorized Claudia’s number.