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AARYN

O nce I decided I was going to be here for a while, I drove my rental car to a dealership and signed a lease.

I’m not sure if Errol’s car-free status is by choice or if he can’t afford one.

My hunch is that he’s just getting by, but he’s refused to take any money from me.

In turn, I just brush him off when he asks what he owes me every time I make a grocery run.

Earlier this week, Errol wasn’t in the house when I got back.

I found him out in the detached garage, wearing a pair of cargo pants that had been chopped into frayed cutoffs and a T-shirt that was damp with sweat.

He was sitting cross-legged on the oil-stained concrete next to a disassembled lawnmower, cursing at it under his breath as I came in.

At the sound of my footsteps, he glanced up.

“Oh, hey.” With his forearms and hands smudged with black grease, he wiped his forehead with a clean spot on the back of his hand.

“Didn’t realize you were back.” He looked down at a part in his hand and went back to trying to wrench a bolt off. “Son-of-a-bitch,” he muttered.

“You can fix lawnmowers, too?” I said in surprise.

He barked out a laugh. “Well, I haven’t fixed it yet . Not this time, at least.”

“How often have you fixed it before?” Errol shrugged, piquing my curiosity. “How long have you had it? How long are lawnmowers supposed to last?”

“Dunno. Until you can’t fix them anymore, I guess.” He sounded distracted as he picked up a canister and squirted something onto the bolt before he tried to loosen it again. He grimaced as his forearms corded and his T-shirt went taut across his shoulders.

A sharp metallic creak broke the silence, and Errol blew out a sigh of exertion and relief. My solution would have been to just buy a new lawnmower or, better yet, pay somebody to cut the grass. Obviously, those options weren’t on the table here, which made me feel awkward as hell.

So did the realization that I had been staring at the muscles in Errol’s arms and back as he wrestled with that stuck bolt.

I ’m turning the money question over in my head as I get behind the wheel, heading to the storage unit where the rest of my worldly possessions are stashed.

Errol and I aren’t in my new silver crossover today; we’re in a rental box truck that’s seen better years, with dingy yellow foam visible beneath the bench seat’s cracked black vinyl.

“I feel like I ought to be paying you rent,” I say as I merge onto the highway.

Errol frowns. “That wasn’t why I asked if you wanted to stay with me.”

“I know. But I’m sure stuff like your water bill has gone up.”

“It’s fine, really,” he says. “I’m happy to have you here.”

“But I feel like I owe you big-time. At least let me pay for my living expenses.” When he purses his lips, I press him. “Come on —I just sold my company. It’s not like I don’t have it.”

Errol gives me a little flutter of eyelashes and a coy smirk. “Are you saying you want to be my sugar daddy?”

“ Pfft .” It’s not much of a retort, but I’m distracted by the sudden frisson Errol’s expression sent through me. “You dork. I just feel weird owing you. Let me pay you back.” I roll my eyes and act dismissive, trying to shake the strange, crackling energy vibrating through me.

I glance over again to see a mischievous light in his eyes. “OK, fine, but I get to decide the terms —when and how I collect,” he says.

“That’s not fair!” I protest. The nonsensical thought flashes through my head that if Errol and I were to touch, it would spark like static electricity.

“Why not? Weren’t you just bragging about how loaded you are?” He scoots over on the bench seat and gives me a little poke in the ribs.

I make an ass out of myself. There’s no spark, of course , but I yelp and jump as if there was, almost sending the truck into the shoulder. “Shit, sorry!” I straighten the steering wheel as my face blazes hot.

Errol looks chastened. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to distract you.”

“It’s OK,” I mumble, and we drive in silence for a little bit. Since I’ve already embarrassed the shit out of myself, I turn my attention to the awkward topic I’ve been most afraid to broach since I came back. “How’s things with your folks? And Dennis?” I ask.

Errol’s inhale sucks all the air out of the cab. My heart drops from my chest down into my feet. Good job, asshole. “Shit, I’m sorry, man,” I say quickly. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

Intellectually, I know life dealt his folks a shit hand. After Errol was born, they decided to play another round of genetic Russian roulette. And on that second spin, the bullet silently slipped into the chamber.

Dennis was younger than Errol by about three years and shared his brother’s dark-brown hair and soulful eyes.

They didn’t have much else in common. As best as the doctors could tell, Dennis had the cognitive development of a twenty-month-old, Errol told me once.

He was what they called medically fragile.

As a teenager, I didn’t know exactly what that meant biologically, but I soon came to see the real-world consequences with devastating clarity: Every minute, every dollar, every ounce of energy the boys’ parents had was consumed by the Herculean task of keeping Dennis alive.

There wasn’t so much as an attaboy or a blip of mental bandwidth left for their remaining son.

They forgot to pick up Errol from games and after-school activities more times than I could count, and almost never remembered to sign permission slips or send him with money for field trips.

Birthdays and holidays slipped by unacknowledged.

Junior year, I bought him a game cartridge for Christmas.

The way his face lit up was the first time I understood the word heartbreak .

My folks didn’t really have a lot of money, but Errol always had an open invite for dinner. And they came through in the clutch when it really mattered.

Halfway through senior year, Errol’s parents heard about an intensive, quasi-experimental therapy to treat Dennis’s condition.

It was being conducted by a highly-regarded university hospital —sixteen hundred miles away.

They contacted the research team and secured a space in the program for Dennis.

They didn’t have much to say about what this meant for Errol.

I still don’t understand how they could effectively abandon him.

There was some vague talk about him moving in with his Gran, who didn’t seem especially keen on the idea and wasn’t even planning to return from her annual winter stint in Florida until the month before graduation.

My best friend was effectively on his own. Horrified, I begged my parents hard to step in. By that point, Errol had so much practice making himself inconspicuous that when I swore they’d hardly even see him if he moved in for the rest of the school year, it wasn’t really a lie.

I’d already taken over the basement, so we scoured local marketplace listings until we found a futon that looked like it wouldn’t fall apart.

My mom put her foot down at the prospect of bringing a secondhand mattress into the house, so she made my dad go buy a new one to put on top of the frame.

Errol promised his parents would pay them back, but everybody knew that wouldn’t happen.

Back then, I used to wonder: Who would Errol have been if life had turned out differently? What would his personality have been like if he hadn’t grown up completely convinced of his own insignificance?

That thought was usually followed by a wave of relief and guilt all mixed up together. In the darkest, meanest part of my soul, I was grateful that things turned out the way they did. Because otherwise, he probably never would have bothered to talk to a gawky nerd like me.

If the other kids had known Errol like I did,he would’ve been popular. I knew it. They wouldn’t have made fun of petty shit like his hair or his weight. He would have gotten hugs and high-fives in the hallways, invites to parties and a steady stream of DMs reaffirming that everybody loved him.

Instead, he just had me. Sure, I stuck up for him and tried to keep bullies off his case. But he deserved better.

E rrol’s sigh is heavy. “I figured it was going to come up sooner or later. He died a couple of years ago —just a couple months after Gran, actually.” He blows out another exhale and gives his head a little shake. “That was a rough fucking stretch for a bit there.”

“Holy shit, I’m sorry. I can only imagine.” The words sound hollow and inadequate.

“No, you can’t imagine.” His voice has gone sharp. When I glance over, the dark smile on his face is so brittle it looks about to crack. “They contested the will.”

“They what ? I mean… holy shit . Your parents tried to take the house?”

“Yeah. Petitioned a judge, the whole nine. Logically, I knew it was bullshit. I mean, I’d been living with her for years by then, keeping the place up, driving her places and, towards the end, even doing the cooking and stuff.

But I would wake up in the middle of the night, sweating, after nightmares about being kicked out. ”

“I’m so sorry. That’s just… fucking wrong .”

Errol kind of shrugs. “I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything different. I kind of feel like an asshole saying that. Because it wasn’t their fault Dennis needed so much time and money and —”

“No. The way they treated you wasn’t right. I’m sure what they went through was awful, but their way of coping was… what? To just ignore the fact that they had two sons, not just one? Uh-uh.”

I shake my head. “It’s not like they had a puppy they realized they didn’t have time for after Dennis came along and needed so much care.

They had another kid . I’m sorry, I feel like a dick saying this, but even though they had it tougher than most parents, at the end of the day they did a shit job actually parenting. ”

My vehemence surprises me. It’s like I still feel that sense of protectiveness towards him that I used to have. Lord only knows why — or what that feeling is good for —anymore. I keep running my mouth, though, because that’s what I do.

“Who knows — maybe if they didn’t orient their lives entirely around Dennis’s care and — oh, I don’t know — chaperoned a field trip or came to an intramural day or some other shit once in a fucking while, maybe they would’ve had the emotional reserves to do a better job taking care of both of you.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Errol whispers. Then I guess neither one of us knows what to say, so we just fall quiet and listen to the swish of the wipers and the hiss of tires on wet pavement.