If your brother really broke his arm. If your brother broke his arm falling from the ash tree in our backyard, the one along the fence. If your brother broke his arm falling from the tree because he’d been left unattended, because I was otherwise occupied, because I was in no condition, and so you had to drive him to urgent care on a learner’s permit after eventually tracking down the keys in my pants pocket. If your mother fed you both ice cream sandwiches for dinner that night, if you’ve never been able to eat another ice cream sandwich since, if the texture of the doughy stale chocolate sticking to the roof of your mouth opens up something inside you you’d rather not think about. If your basketball team won state, if you met the governor, if you traveled to Detroit, to Toronto, to Oklahoma City, to DC, if a girl broke your heart, if the world broke your heart over and over, if your brother came home less and less and then not really at all, if you memorized two dozen separate star constellations, if that’s how you impressed the next girl who broke your heart, and the next. If you enlisted, if you ran clear across the surface of the planet, if you served in Afghanistan, and came home, and Iraq, and came home, and Afghanistan again, if you wrote me letters from Gardez and Fallujah and Herat, not asking for anything, just checking in, just hoping to hear back. If you were restless, if you were so restless you ran for office, if you actually won somehow, if you became a congressman, if you became a senator, if you became the President, the honest-to-God President of the United States of America, if you found yourself under the hot lights of a television set sitting across from Barbara Walters or Diane Sawyer or one of those, in your expensive suit and subtle makeup with a tasteful bouquet of hyacinths or carnations resting in a vase next to you because your advisers were trying to soften your image before the reelect, if you actually said on live television, in front of the whole world, with a steely and distant but tender look in your eyes “My father was a complicated but decent and kind man. He was tough, and he made me tough” and you were so good at this kind of thing that everyone who watched you say these words -- myself included, allegedly -- believed them without a doubt in their minds. If any of that happened. If any of that were really true, no matter how much I’d had to drink, or how busy I’d been with work, or how far gone my mind had grown these last few years, or how confused and endless all the nights that got just a little bit away from me. Don’t you think I’d know? Don’t you think I’d remember a thing like that?
