“I can help,” I offer.

“Maybe,” my brother answers.

Spence slides open the barn door and I’m met with a breath of cool, musty air flavored with just a hint of shit.  It’s a nice barn, as barns go.  Spence razed the dilapidated structure that had been eroding since the mid fifties.  He built something sturdier and more functional in its place.  No one would ever accuse the boxy structure of being aesthetic but it’s not supposed to be.    There is wall separating the attached garage where Spence works on cars to pay the bills.  Out of the four simple stalls on the other side, three are occupied.  There is the soft rumble of an exhaling animal to my left and I’m nudged by a large brown nose.

Spencer heaves the saddle from his arms and holds out a wide palm.  “Easy, girl.  Easy there, Pet.”

“Pet?”  I squint in the darkness at the gentle brown mare.  “This isn’t the same horse.”

“Nope.”

“But you gave her the same name.”

“Yup.”

I nod in toward the horse in the neighboring stall.  “His name Pet too?”

“No.”

Spencer doesn’t seem like he’s in the mood to talk, which is pretty well par for the course.  Words and Spencer have never gotten along real well.

I grab a wide broom off the wall and start sweeping the floor in front of the stalls, even though there’s nothing much on the floor for me to sweep.   Out of the corner of my eye I see Rash creep silently through the door, camera in hand.  I’m startled to realize there are at least three other cameras mounted in the beams of the barn.  For a few seconds I’d forgotten about them.

“How are ya, Ren?”  Spence asks and he gives me a frank look.

I swallow.  “I can’t complain.”

“You could.  But you won’t.”

“What does that mean?”

“I didn’t think you’d show up.  I really didn’t.  Figured this place was full of too many ghosts for you.”

“I can handle the ghosts of Savages past.”

“All of them?”  Spence has turned his face away and I’m not sure I heard him right.

“What?”

He looks me in the eye.  “You heard me.”

I lower my head.  “I did.  It’s time I got around to thanking you for what you did that night.”

“I didn’t do nothing.  So don’t thank me.”

A long, silent moment passes and then Spence produces carrots for the horses. Silently he hands a few over, watching as I offer them to the animals.

“And how are you, Spence?  I worry about you out here you know.”

“I know.  You shouldn’t.”

“Do you have a girl?”

“Whenever I need one.”

The earlier gloom has passed and I laugh.  Spencer isn’t bragging.  He just tells the truth and doesn’t care what anyone thinks about it, not unlike Montgomery in that way.  Both of my brothers are hard characters.  At this point they might get along if either of them decided to give a half ass effort.  Perhaps that’s one thing that will wind up coming out of these odd circumstances.   Maybe it will bring us together.

Or tear us apart. 

Spencer soothes the horses for a few more minutes and then retreats into the garage.  After sweeping up the stalls, refilling the horse troughs and straightening some odds and ends I can’t think of anything else to do in here.  Despite the fact that there’s sweat trickling down my back and a gritty sensation all over my skin, I feel good.  There’s a certain satisfaction that comes with work, any work.  Now if I only I can spend the next eight weeks sweeping out the barn, I might make it through all this.

Spence has his head in the guts of a car and I don’t want to disturb him.  The sun is hotter than it was when I ducked into the barn.  I wish I had some sunglasses as I briskly cover the distance between the barn and the brothel.  There’s no answer on Monty’s door, meaning he’s either sleeping something off or he’s out somewhere searching for trouble.

After giving up on Monty and walking around the south side of the property, I pause at the ruins of a rose garden once kept by my grandmother.  Hell only knows how she managed to keep delicate roses blooming in a fierce climate like this or why she would even have bothered when she and her husband only averaged a few months out of the year here, but she did.  I’ve seen the pictures.  Enormous lemon-colored roses that looked as if they were painted with a Technicolor brush.

My nephew is asleep on a leather chair in the living room, curled up like a cat with a small stuffed dog wedged in the crook of an elbow.  He’s precious, this little boy.  I need to make an effort to spend more time with him.  I touch his sweet face as I pass by.

I hear Brigitte’s voice coming from somewhere, echoing throughout the narrow hallways.  She’s having a biting argument with someone via speaker phone, interrupting every six seconds to talk over the guy on the other end.   The man she’s yelling at sounds as if he’s had enough of her. Brigitte has a flair for provoking moods like that.

Ava is softly at my side before I hear her coming.

“Did Monty take off?”

“I don’t know, did he?” she wrinkles her nose.  “I thought I heard an engine gunning a little while ago so it’s possible.  Where have you been?”

“Capering around in the manure with Spence.”

“Spence likes manure.”

“Of course he does.  Manure doesn’t talk back.”

Ava laughs lightly and brushes a hand across her sleeping son’s cheek.  Alden’s father was cut from the same cloth we were.  Child of celebrities, privileged and fucked up since birth.   He’d already been hitting the party scene pretty hard when he and Ava hooked up.  Costars on a short-lived family sitcom, they were bad for each other; a wild and entitled pair who behaved as rowdily as they pleased.  The paparazzi had a field day with them partying all over Hollywood and Lita, goddamn her, encouraged it.  Of course it couldn’t last.  All Ava got out of it was a broken heart and early motherhood.  She told me once what Lita had demanded upon the news of her pregnancy.  “Get rid of it.”  Ava refused.  After that Lita was pretty well done with her.  She’d been done with me for a long time already.

Ava follows me when I head to the kitchen.  My hands are dirty.  All I can find in the way of soap is an ancient trial sized bottle of dishwashing liquid.   It takes me a full minute to realize there’s a crew member in the room.  It’s Elton, the guy Monty apparently had a rough time with yesterday.  He doesn’t make a sound.  He’s just parked there in a corner, like an appliance.  For all I know he’s been glued to the wall.

“You know,” says Ava brightly, “I think it would be fun to have a nice family dinner tonight.”

“You do?”

Somewhere there are families who habitually sit down together at a certain hour and avoid eye contact as they slice their way into fried pork chops.  At least I think there are.  I’ve never actually seen one.  Savages don’t do sit down dinners.  When we were kids we would just kind of forage handfuls of cereal or a bag of chips from the pantry because Lita couldn’t even boil water.  Even when I learned to cook, meals were somewhat haphazard because no one could seem to sit down in the same place at once.

Ava is rooting around in the cabinets, which are magically stocked with things that seem to puzzle her.

“What do you do with tomato paste?” she asks.

“Glue bananas together,” I say but she doesn’t seem to hear me.

“I’ll make spaghetti,” announces my sister loudly, as she grabs some cans and a box of pasta.

I don’t buy it.  Sure, Ava’s calmed down a lot since her party days but she doesn’t fool anyone as the domestic type.  Last time I visited her she agonized over how to puree carrots for Alden’s dinner.  Someone must have put the idea in her head that all of us squished around a table for an hour might light some fireworks.

When I open the refrigerator I am surprised to see it as well stocked as most restaurants.  No way was that Spence’s doing.