He greets me with a weary nod as if we see each other far too often for his taste.  Then he gestures that I ought to follow him inside and shoots a warning glance toward a skulking cameraman in the background.

“Fuck you,” he sneers at the man.  “Told Gary I’m not fucking with that shit until tomorrow.”

He slams the door at my back and looks me up and down with his arms crossed.  “They got a piece on you?”

His voice is even more gruff than I remember, as if life has scratched it up a bit and added a few pounds of gravel.  There’s a tattoo on his neck.  Not a good one.  It’s a stark tribal shape that might as easily mean something as it means nothing.

“What?” I answer, a little startled because it sounds like my brother is asking if I’m carrying a gun.

Monty raises his eyebrows.  They are roguishly sculpted things that have a mood all their own.  Anyone would assume a little manscaping is to thank.

But Monty doesn’t cultivate his looks.  He doesn’t have to. Whatever advantages he has are a Savage legacy.  His looks, among other things.

“A mic, Ren.  They fit you with a microphone?”

“Oh.”  My brother averts his eyes as I reach fumbling fingers into my blouse and extract the device taped to my skin.  I’m holding it in my hand and wondering how to mute it when Monty hisses between his teeth, grabs it, and severs the wire with a prompt snap between two fists.  He lets it fall to the scruffy old parquet floor and we stand there staring down at the pieces.

“That was violent,” I comment and look up, surprised to see Montgomery Savage grinning.  If I wasn’t so stunned at the sight I would probably applaud.

“How the hell are ya, Loren?”

“I may have misplaced my mind but that’s probably a good idea considering what’s about to go down.” I pause, looking my brother over more carefully.  He’s bulked up but not in a soft way at all.  He is a bristling wall of muscle and scarcely bottled wrath.

If I weren’t his sister I would run across the street to avoid him.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I say with honesty because after all, I am his sister and right now we are a family in sore need of allies.

Monty clears his throat with a small nod and I know that’s the best acknowledgement I’ll get.

We don’t hug.  Ava and Brigitte are huggers.   The rest of us are aloof nodders.

He starts walking toward a portable fridge in the corner of the room and seems to expect I’ll follow him.  He fishes out a few Blue Moon beers and hands one over.   He sucks back his whole bottle before I can even twist the cap off and take a sip.

My brother stares moodily out the window with a frown.  The barren valley at the foothills of the Harquehala stare back.  At least the cameramen are warily distant at the moment.  Instead of pressing a lens against the glass panes they are nowhere in sight.

Monty seems to know my thoughts.   He shoots me a wry glance.  “Guess we should enjoy our last few moments of obscurity.”

I snort.  “Is that what you call this?”

“What do you call it?”

“Popular indifference.  We are noteworthy when we do something violent or indecent.”

Monty rolls his eyes.  “That sounds like a shot if there ever was one.”

“I wasn’t talking about you.  Come on, Monty.  You know I don’t cut you down that way.  I’m not Lita.”  I take a swallow of beer.  It’s warm. Only the bottle was cool.  “We’re not here to produce some down home family feel good show.  We were given this shot because we’re-“

“Fuckups,” my brother finishes and holds his bottle up in a mock toast before draining the last drop and tossing it across the room into an empty cardboard box that seems to be serving as a trash can.  “At least some of us, anyway.  You’ve managed to keep your nose clean.  Me?  Not so much.”

I pause.  I haven’t talked to Monty much over the past few years.  Whatever communication we’ve had tends to skirt carefully away from subjects like prison and fortysomething sugar mamas.  I can see the change in him though.  Monty was never full of sunshine and delight.  But now there’s a steeliness to him that’s sharp and a little frightening.  He stews in his own skin like a large angry animal.  Suddenly my heart hurts for him, for Monty, my big brother, even though he would be the last man on the planet to ask for pity.

“I’m sorry,” I mumble miserably.  I’m confronted by my own selfishness.  I’ve removed myself from my siblings, remaining at an emotional and physical distance all because I was nursing a hurt that I’ve never been able to face.

It seemed like the only way to heal my soul was to stay away from the things, the places, the people, that reminded me of what I’d lost.

Anything reminiscent of Oscar.

“Hey, Ren,” says Monty with some gentle concern.  He’s peering at me and I don’t realize I’m crying until dueling tears spill down my cheeks.  My brother sighs and plucks the beer out of my hand, setting it carefully on the counter.

Monty coughs into one hand and sighs again.  “It’s not your fault.  You’ve always done the thing where you try to carry all the family’s shit on your shoulders so we don’t have to.  I know it’s fucked up for you to be back here.  And I know why.”

“Do you?”  I’m surprised.  We’ve never talked about him.  The day he left was the last day any of us spoke his name out loud.  “It’s just history.  All of it.  It only messes us up if we let it.”

A crooked grin crosses his face.  “Who’s messed up?  I’m fucking spectacular.”

I grin back.  “Sure you are.”

He shrugs.  “Easy confirmation. Just ask anything on the west coast with a set of tits.”

“That’s a lot of tits, Montgomery.”

“I could stand to meet some more.  As soon as we wrap up this circus I plan on working my way east until I hit an ocean or something.”

“That’ll keep you busy for a little while.”

“Maybe.”

A shadow of pain pulses beneath my left eyebrow.  An old enemy, prologue to a migraine.  My hand goes to my forehead, pressing the spot.  If I take two Excedrin within the next fifteen minutes I might be able to head it off in time.

Monty opens a narrow cabinet beside the kitchen sink.  After knocking a few other things aside, he finds what he’s looking for.  He tosses a bottle to me and I’m glad to pop it open and swallow two of the pills that rattle around inside as my brother watches.

“It’ll be okay, Ren,” he says quietly and touches my shoulder in a rare gesture of brotherly affection.

And that’s Monty; impenetrable, solitary, but capable of rare flashes of gallantry.  I remember once when I was nine and he was ten.  We were in the middle of a childhood war.  Usually such conflicts were Monty vs. Spence or Monty vs. Lita or Monty vs. Everyone.  But we battled one-on-one every now and then.

Monty had been pissed for weeks because I’d accidentally left the water on when filling the tub in the hallway bathroom beside his bedroom.  Water spilled over the top of the old claw foot tub, flowed across the threshold and found a shoebox full of the vintage video game cartridges he’d left on the floor just inside his room.   They might have been salvageable if Monty had the patience to consider such a thing.  Instead he screamed and ranted and set the box afire in the backyard barbecue pit. If it was Spencer’s fault he would have clobbered him without mercy but even when in a rage Monty would never hit us girls.  He glared and brooded, held his nose whenever I walked into the room, ignored me more than usual at school where we were in the same class because he’d been held back in second grade. I shrugged it all off irritably because I understood my brother well enough to know that sooner or later he would move on to a different grievance.

And then came the Faberge egg incident.  It was the most valuable object in the crumbling mansion where chandeliers hadn’t operated for decades, fixtures were cracked and ants marched in dogged lines along the ivory-colored stucco walls.  The egg was an emerald green, encrusted with exquisite pink roses, a gift bestowed on our screen goddess grandmother by some minor European royalty.  It used to sit in its own display case in the center of the second floor library, one of the few remaining treasures that hadn’t yet been sold off.