The Brother Years by Shannon Burke

Author:Shannon Burke [Burke, Shannon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

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The next week Dad took a temporary renovation job and got the maintenance contract for a second building on Central Street in Seneca. If we finished the renovation before the end of the summer we would have enough money for the down payment, but it meant we would have to work crazy hours over the summer. There was the janitor work and the renovation work and the paper route in the morning, and Dad was also teaching tennis about fifteen hours a week and he was supposed to be writing a thesis for his teacher’s certificate. He was sleeping three hours a night, at best, and the rest of us weren’t sleeping much more. It was our summer of drudgery. But I have to admit that along with the endless work there was also a sense of camaraderie and accomplishment. We kept tabs on how much money we’d made. We watched the savings accumulate bit by bit. And there was a feeling of satisfaction in thinking we were all contributing. More than anyone else, I was invested in those moneymaking schemes. I bragged to my friends that I had to work to help buy our house. I walked around with ripped jeans covered in paint speckles, talking about the down payment like I knew anything about it.

“Typical Willie,” Coyle said. “Always a fucking drama.”

In his view I’d spent my freshman year hanging out with Robert Dainty, pretending I was a rich kid. Then suddenly I was acting like I was some street urchin out of a Dickens novel. I think I single-handedly convinced Coyle to get a haircut because he saw how ridiculous the blue-collar affectation was on me.

So the summer passed. We all worked all the time. And for a while it seemed as if we would save enough to buy the house, but in the end there were the normal setbacks that always seemed to happen to our family. The car broke down and needed a new water pump and then the IRS demanded an additional payment, and there was interest on our debt that Dad hadn’t expected, and by the time school was approaching it became clear that, despite all our work, we weren’t going to make it. In the last weeks of the summer there was a sense of diminishing enthusiasm as we understood that our sacrifice had come to nothing. And then one day in August, the week before school started up again, Dad drove into the driveway towing a sailboat.

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