His mother swung the door open with a flourish.
“What do you think?” she asked. “I’ll give you a hint. Personally, I can’t believe the difference.”
She was right. The room was transformed. The boxes were gone. The window glass sparkled. The wooden floor had been swept and mopped and the foldaway bed had been laid out flat and at its head a little table he had never seen before acted as a nightstand. A warm breeze sucked the freshly laundered curtains against the screen and blew them out again and somehow the whole room smelled like a lemon orchard.
Great, he signed. It’s never looked this good.
“Of course not, it’s been filled with junk! Know what the best part is? Your father says that this used to be Claude’s room when he was growing up. Can you imagine that? Here, you get that side.” She billowed a sheet over the mattress and they tucked their way up from the foot of the bed. Each of them stuffed a pillow into a pillowcase. His mother kept looking at him as they worked. Finally she stopped and stood up.
“What’s bothering you?”
Nothing. I don’t know. He paused and looked around. What did you do with everything?
“I found some nooks and crannies. A lot of it I put in the basement. I thought you and your father could cart those old chairs to the dump this weekend.”
Then she slipped into sign, which she performed unhurriedly and with great precision.
Did you want to ask me something about Claude?
Have I ever met him? When I was little?
No. I’ve only met him once myself. He enlisted in the navy the year before I met your father, and he’s only been back once, for your grandfather’s funeral.
Why did he join the navy?
I don’t know. Sometimes people enlist to see more of the world. Your father says Claude didn’t always get along with your grandfather. That’s another reason people enlist. Or maybe none of those things.
How long is he staying?
A while. Until he finds a place of his own. He’s been gone a long time. He might not stay at all. This might be too small of a place for him now.
Does he know about the dogs?
She laughed. He grew up here. He probably doesn’t know them like your father does, not anymore. He sold his share of the kennel to your father when your grandfather died.
Edgar nodded. After they were finished he waited until his mother was occupied and then carried the lamps up from the basement to his room. He set them on opposite ends of his bookshelves, and he and Almondine spent the afternoon pulling books off the shelves and leafing through them.
IT WAS LONG AFTER DARK when the headlights of the truck swept the living room walls. Edgar and his mother and Almondine waited on the back porch while his father turned the truck around by the barn. The porch light glinted off the glass of the windshield and the truck rolled to a stop. His father got out of the cab, his expression serious, even cross, though it softened when he looked up at them. He gave a small, silent wave, then walked to the rear of the truck and opened the topper and lifted out a lone suitcase. At first Claude stayed inside the cab, visible only in silhouette. He craned his neck to look around. Then the passenger door swung open and he stepped out and Edgar’s father walked up beside him.
It was impossible not to make comparisons. His father’s brother wore an ill-fitting serge suit, in which he looked uneasy and shabbily formal. From the way it hung on him, he was the thinner of the two. Claude’s hair was black where his father’s was peppered. He stood with a slightly stooped posture, perhaps from the long drive, which made it hard to tell who was taller. And Claude didn’t wear glasses. In all, Edgar’s first impression was of someone quite different from his father, but then Claude turned to look at the barn and in profile the similarities jumped out—the shapes of their noses and chins and foreheads. And when they walked into the side yard, their gaits were identical, as if their bodies were hinged in precisely the same way. Edgar had a sudden, strange thought: that’s what it’s like to have a brother.
“Looks about the same,” Claude was saying. His voice was deeper than Edgar’s father’s, and gravelly. “I guess I expected things to have changed some.”
“There’s more difference than you think,” his father said. Edgar could hear the irritation in his tone from across the yard. “We repainted a couple of years back, but we stayed with white. The sashes on the two front windows rotted out so we replaced them with that big picture window—you’ll see when we get inside. And a lot of the wiring and plumbing has been fixed, stuff you can’t see.”
“That’s new,” Claude said, nodding at the pale green LP gas cylinder beside the house.
“We got rid of the coal furnace almost ten years ago,” his father said. He put his hand lightly on Claude’s back and his voice sounded friendly again. “Come on, let’s go in. We can look around later.”
He steered Claude toward the porch. When they reached the steps, Claude went up first. Edgar’s mother held the door, and Claude stepped through and turned.
“Hello, Trudy,” he said.
“Hello, Claude,” she said. “Welcome home. It’s nice to have you here.” She hugged him briefly, squeezing up her shoulders in an embrace that was both friendly and slightly formal. Then she stepped back, and Edgar felt her hand on his shoulder.
“Claude, meet Edgar,” she said.
Claude shifted his gaze from Trudy and held out his hand. Edgar shook it, though awkwardly. He was surprised at how hard Claude squeezed, how it made him aware of the bones in his hands, and how callused Claude’s palms were. Edgar felt like he was gripping a hand made of wood. Claude looked him up and down.
“Pretty good sized, aren’t you?”
It wasn’t exactly what Edgar expected him to say. Before he could reply, Claude’s gaze shifted again, this time to Almondine, who stood swinging her tail in anticipation.
“And this is?”
“Almondine.”
Claude knelt, and it was clear at once that he had been around dogs a long time. Instead of petting Almondine or scratching her ruff, he held out his hand, knuckle first, for her to sniff. Then he puckered his lips and whistled a quietly hummed tweedle, high and low at the same time. Almondine sat up straight and cocked her head left and right. Then she stepped forward and scented Claude thoroughly. When Edgar looked up, his father had a look of shocked recollection on his face.
“Hey, girl,” Claude said. “What a beauty.” Only after Almondine had finished taking his scent did Claude touch her. He stroked her withers and scratched her on the chest behind her elbow and ran his hand along her belly. She closed up her mouth and arched her back in a gesture of tolerant satisfaction.
“Man, it’s been—” Claude seemed at a loss for words. He kept stroking Almondine’s coat. He swallowed and took a breath and stood up. “I’d forgotten what they’re like,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I could just run my hand over a dog like that.”
There was an awkward silence and then Edgar’s father led Claude up to the revitalized spare room. They’d waited dinner and Edgar set the table while his mother pulled ham out of the refrigerator and cut up leftover potatoes to fry. They worked in silence, listening to the talk. As though to make up for his earlier comment, Claude pointed out differences, large and small, between the way things looked and the way he remembered them. When they came downstairs, the two men stood in the wide passageway between the kitchen and the living room.
“How about dinner?” his mother asked.
“That’d