The bow was the size of a truck tire, red satin, the kind they sell at the dealership for forty dollars and tie on with a strap so it won't blow off on the drive home. My father had set it on the hood himself.
I know because I watched him from the kitchen window at six in the morning, in his gym shorts and his Calder Custom Docks polo, fussing with the loops the way other men fuss with a fishing lure, stepping back, stepping in, pulling one side a quarter inch higher.
Under the bow was a BMW M4 Competition in a blue so deep it looked wet. The window sticker was still on the glass, and I didn't mean to read it, but I'm the kind of person who reads things. Eighty-eight thousand, six hundred and forty dollars, out the door.
It was the second Saturday of April in Hixson, Tennessee, about twenty minutes north of downtown Chattanooga if the traffic on 153 behaved, and it was my brother Grant's twentieth birthday, which in our house was called Grant Day and had been called Grant Day since before I could spell it.
I'm going to tell this the way it happened, which means I have to start by being fair to them, because that's the part nobody believes afterward. My parents were not monsters. My mother, Denise, ran the front office at Hixson First Methodist for nineteen years and could remember the name of every shut-in on the prayer list and what kind of pie they couldn't eat because of their sugar. My father, Rick, built boat docks and lifts on Chickamauga Lake, and when I was nine and scared of the water he took me out on a pontoon at dusk and held the back of my life jacket while I paddled in circles and told me I was a natural. They came to my science fairs. They clapped at my debate tournaments, when they could make it. They were not people who would have recognized themselves in anything I am about to say.
But there are families where love is weather, and it falls on everyone, and there are families where love is irrigation, and somebody has to decide which field gets watered. In my house, my father decided, and he had decided early, and the field was Grant.
* * *
By two o'clock there were maybe forty people in our backyard. Men from Dad's Rotary club, the youth pastor, two of Grant's old teammates from Hixson High who'd driven up from Murfreesboro with him, the neighbors on both sides, Mrs. Abernathy from church with her