left. I asked him how he paid cash and he told me. He was proud of it. He said, Your sister will land on her feet, she always does, and you needed this. And I said, Dad, I can't take this. And he said—" Grant's jaw went tight, and in that second he looked so much like our father that it scared me. "He said, If you hand me back those keys in front of this family, you'll humiliate me. Is that what you want to do to me, after this year? And I didn't say anything. I just stood there. Like always."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"I tried. At dinner. You saw. He said, Grant, don't. And I didn't." He looked at me. "I'm twenty years old, Jo, and I still do what he says when he uses that voice. You're eighteen and you screamed in his face and walked out of the house. I've thought about that every night since."
"I didn't scream in his face. I screamed across the pork chops."
He laughed, a real one this time, short and wet. Then he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper and handed it to me.
It was a copy of a Tennessee certificate of title. Vehicle: BMW M4 Competition. Owner: Grant Richard Calder.
"He put it in my name," Grant said. "For the insurance, and because he wanted me to feel like it was mine. It's mine. Legally. I can sell it. I talked to a guy at a dealership in Knoxville. They'll take it back. I'll lose a lot. It's already worth like fifteen thousand less than he paid. But I can get somewhere around seventy, maybe seventy-two."
"No," I said.
"Jo—"
"No. I don't want you to fix it. That's not your job. You didn't do this."
"I kept the keys."
"You were scared."
"I'm still scared," he said. "That's sort of the point. If I don't do this, I'm going to be scared of him for the rest of my life, and I'm going to drive around in his blue car being scared." He took the title back from me and folded it along its creases. "It's not pity. It's not for you, even. Okay, it's partly for you. Mostly it's for me. I need to hand him something heavy for once."
We stood there a while. The wedding party at the south end released a cloud of bubbles from little plastic wands, and the wind caught them and carried them up the bridge toward us, hundreds of them, catching the light, popping against the iron.