On Thursdays the car was never in the driveway, because on Thursdays Mom took Jordan to the orthodontist.
"Again?" Caleb said, the third Thursday in February, when he came home to a note on the counter that said Back by 6 — mac & cheese in fridge — LOVE YOU. The LOVE YOU was in capital letters, like a store sign. "He doesn't even have braces."
"They're doing a whole consultation thing," Mom had said that morning, buttering toast with the speed of someone defusing a bomb. "Measurements. Molds. You'll get your turn."
"I don't want a turn."
"Good, because you have perfect teeth, and I'd like to keep it that way. Floss."
That was the orthodontist. Then there were the Saturdays. Mom worked most Saturday mornings, and for as long as Caleb could remember, Saturdays had meant the boys got dropped at Grandpa Walt's place out on Route 9 until she got off. Grandpa had a pole barn behind his trailer where he fixed lawnmowers and chain saws and the occasional go-kart for people who paid him in cash or pies, and the whole place smelled like two-stroke oil and Folgers. When Caleb was little he had loved it. He had loved the bins of bolts, the way you could plunge your arm into them up to the elbow, the cold slither of all that metal. But then he'd turned twelve and Dev's family had moved in down the street and the barn had started to feel like a place where time stopped, and somewhere around October, Caleb had started saying he had homework, and Mom had started letting him stay home.
Jordan kept going. Every Saturday. He'd come home with black grease in the lines of his knuckles and a look on his face that Caleb couldn't read, a kind of private satisfaction, like a kid who'd been given a secret and was carrying it carefully so it wouldn't spill.
"What do you even do out there?" Caleb asked him once, at dinner.
Jordan shrugged. "Sort stuff."
"For six hours?"
"There's a lot of stuff."
"He's a big help," Mom said, and looked at Jordan, and Jordan looked at his plate, and something passed between them that Caleb was not invited to. He saw it the way you see a car pass on the highway at night — just the light of it, gone.
He started keeping track. He didn't decide to. It just started happening in the back of his head, a ledger with a column for Jordan and a column for him. Thursday afternoons: Jordan. Saturday morning drives: Jordan. The last of the good cereal, the kind with the marshmallows that Mom only bought when it was on sale: Jordan, because Jordan "hadn't been eating great." The way Mom's voice changed when she said Jordan's name, went lower and slower, like she was carrying something hot. The way she came into Jordan's room at night and stayed, and Caleb could hear the murmur of her through the wall, on and on, a sound with no words in it, and then she'd pass his door and say, "Night, Cal," without stopping, because Caleb was fine. Caleb was always fine. Caleb had straight A's except in Spanish and perfect teeth and he didn't need anything.
On his side of the ledger he wrote: no.