“That’s me,” Walter said. “I heard Mitch was living with you?”
“Yah, he comes and goes. You can probably find him up at Peter Lake now, the county campground there. You need him for something in particular?”
“No, I was just in the neighborhood.”
“Yah, he’s had it pretty rough since Stacy threw him out. I try to help him out a little bit.”
“She threw him out?”
“Oh, well, y’know. Two sides to every story, right?”
It was nearly an hour’s drive to Peter Lake, back up toward Grand Rapids. Arriving at the campground, which looked a little bit like an auto junkyard and was especially charmless in the midday sun, Walter saw a paunchy old guy squatting by a mud-stained red tent and scraping fish scales onto a sheet of newspaper. Only after he’d driven past him did he realize, from the resemblance to his father, that this was Mitch. He parked the van close against a poplar, to catch a little shade, and asked himself what he was doing here. He wasn’t prepared to offer Mitch the house at Nameless Lake; he thought that he and Lalitha might live in it themselves for a season or two while they figured out their future. But he wanted to be more like Lalitha, more fearless and humanitarian, and although he could see that it might actually be kinder just to leave Mitch alone, he took a deep breath and walked back to the red tent.
“Mitch,” he said.
Mitch was scaling an eight-inch sunny and didn’t look up. “Yeah.”
“It’s Walter. It’s your brother.”
He did look up then, with a reflexive sneer that turned into a genuine smile. He’d lost his good looks, or, more precisely, they had shrunk into a small facial oasis in a desert of sunburned bloat. “Holy shit,” he said. “Little Walter! What are you doing here?”
“Just stopped by to see you.”
Mitch wiped his hands on his very dirty cargo shorts and extended one to Walter. It was a flabby hand and Walter squeezed it hard.
“Yeah, sure, that’s great,” Mitch said generally. “I was just about to open a beer. You want a beer? Or are you still teetotaling?”
“I’ll have a beer,” Walter said. He realized that it would have been kind and Lalitha-like to have brought Mitch a few sixpacks, and then he thought that it was also kind to let Mitch be generous with something. He didn’t know which was the greater kindness. Mitch crossed his untidy campsite to an enormous cooler and came back with two cans of PBR.
“Yeah,” he said, “I saw that van go by and wondered what kind of hippies we had moving in. Are you a hippie now?”
“Not exactly.”
While flies and yellowjackets feasted on the guts of Mitch’s suspended fish-cleaning project, the two of them sat down on a pair of ancient camp stools, made of wood and mildew-splotched canvas, that had been their father’s. Walter recognized other similarly ancient gear around the site. Mitch, like their father, was a great talker, and as he filled Walter in on his present mode of existence, and on the litany of bad breaks and back injuries and car accidents and irreconcilable marital differences that had led to this existence, Walter was struck by what a different kind of drunk he was than their father had been. Alcohol or time’s passage seemed to have expunged all memory of his and Walter’s enmity. He exhibited no trace of a sense of responsibility, but also, therefore, neither defensiveness nor resentment. It was a sunny day and he was just doing his thing. He drank steadily but without hurry; the afternoon was long.
“So where are you getting your money?” Walter said. “Are you working?”
Mitch leaned over somewhat unsteadily and opened a tackle box in which there was a small pile of paper money and maybe fifty dollars in coins. “My bank,” he said. “I got enough to last through the warm weather. I had a night-watchman job in Aitkin last winter.”
“And what are you going to do when this runs out?”
“I’ll find something. I take pretty good care of myself.”
“You worry about your kids?”
“Yeah, I worry, sometimes. But they’ve got good mothers that know how to take care of them. I’m no help at that. I finally figured that out. I’m only good at taking care of me.”
“You’re a free man.”
“That I am.”
They fell silent. A small breeze had kicked up, casting a million diamonds across the surface of Peter Lake. On the far side, a few fishermen were lazing in aluminum rowboats. Somewhere closer, a raven was croaking, another camper was chopping wood. Walter had been spending his days outdoors all summer, many of them in far more remote and unsettled places than this, but at no point had he felt farther from the things that constituted his life than he was feeling now. His children, his work, his ideas, the women he loved. He knew his brother wasn’t interested in this life—was beyond being interested in anything—and he had no desire to speak of it. To inflict that on him. But at the very moment his telephone rang, showing an unfamiliar West Virginia number, he was thinking how lucky and blessed his life had been.
MISTAKES WERE MADE (CONCLUSION)
A Sort of Letter to Her Reader by Patty Berglund
Chapter 4: Six Years
