I remember you—my little brother—rolling tobacco from the butts of other people’s cigarettes. Mama taught us not to waste. When I’m out to dinner with friends, if someone doesn’t finish, I’ll ask, are you going to eat that?
I’m sure you remember how I pride myself on being somebody who will eat whatever others leave behind. When I lived in the trailer park on the Treasure Coast, I picked up all the bruised mangos that fell from the tree. No one else wanted them. It was six years ago, when you were still alive, and I’ve moved 70 miles north, but I still have some in my freezer because I don’t want to know what it’s like to be without them.
When people die, they leave food behind. I still have your jar of dried kidney beans in the kitchen. The jar was among your belongings after they found your body in Philadelphia. A friend packed everything in the trunk of your car, which trapped the scent of your corpse. She warned me about this because no one knew how long you’d been lying in your apartment before the police found you. I remember the smell. This is what I think of when I see your jar of kidney beans.
I remember the rice, but I don’t remember whether or not it was in a jar. We held the memorial at our old high school and someone decided to cook the rice from your apartment. They couldn’t cook all of it. One container had weevils. It felt like eating a part of you.
I remember how you listened, how you nodded while sharpening a switchblade on a whetstone, a cigarette hanging from the corner of your mouth. You were always hurting yourself.
Remember that time you were drunk and high and you sliced your hand open on a ninja star? Mama screamed but she wouldn’t let anyone call an ambulance because the house was full of underage kids drinking booze. At some point you recovered, your hand wrapped in a duct-taped t-shirt. Remember how you always said, if you can’t ‘duck’ it, fuck it? We found you eating a large pizza on the floor of the bathroom.
I remember the beginning, which feels like the end. When I was six and you were four, Mama made us run away from home. The three of us hid behind a shed in the woods, our backs to the corrugated metal wall.
Fifteen years later I decided to find our father’s side of the family, even though Mama didn’t like it. Do you remember? She told us Grandmom and Grandpop didn’t really love us, but that Thanksgiving, they welcomed us into their home—we were strangers—and we ate mashed potatoes, corn, steamed broccoli, pie and Jell-O desserts and Grandmom’s famous cherry-cheese.
It was too late. I remember how we got to know our father, and then he was crushed by a four-wheeler. They kept him alive for a year. He was a vegetable.
When I tell the stories, I laugh because I have to. I tell people I fabricated everything from a Days of Our Lives episode, but it isn’t true. I’ve never even seen the show, so maybe I’m totally and completely off-base and nothing like it could’ve ever happened on a sound stage.
I remember how you sat still against the wall of the shed in the woods that day when you were four years old, your eyes dry, your face expressionless—do you?
When you were 27, Dad was already dead, and you were always changing your number so Mama couldn’t find you. You had the same look on your face two months before you shot yourself. I remember how your eyes said, nothing has changed in 23 years.
I remember when you helped me move. You made a cheese sandwich for me. You never used dishes. You liked spicy mustard. You took your own sandwich outside and sat on the stoop to eat. I said, thank you, Miles, and I joined you, and we ate, together.
