My Brother Was Not Told
He came in the back way, which was the way he had always come in, through the yard and the scullery and the boot room, with a stamping of feet on the mat that sounded like the announcement of a larger man than he was. He had not grown larger. Sean was still a lean hard small man in the way of our father's people, with a face that kept its weather on it. He was forty-one. He had more grey in him than I did. He came into the kitchen taking off his jacket and he saw me and he stopped with one arm out of the sleeve and the other still in it, and he said, "Jesus."
"Hello," I said.
He finished taking off the jacket. He did it slowly, to buy himself a second, and I watched him do it and I did not help him by speaking, because I had taken up my mother's method, which was to let a silence cost the other person.
"Mam," he said.
"She came today," my mother said, at the stove. "I didn't have your number on the phone."
"You've my number on the phone. You rang me at half two."
"I didn't want to be telling you down the phone."
"What were you going to tell me down the phone?"
"That she was coming."
"Well, she's come."
"She has."
Sean hung the jacket on the back of the chair and he looked at me and he put a hand on the back of his neck and he rubbed it, which was a thing our father used to do when he was deciding whether to be angry, and then he took the hand down and he walked