I laughed in the gas station parking lot, alone in my car, with the wipers going, and put the car in drive.
My parents live on the east side of the lake, a few miles out of town, in the same cedar-shingled house where I grew up, at the bottom of a long gravel driveway that slopes down through ponderosa pines to the water. I did exactly what I said I would do. I parked at the top of the driveway, by the mailbox, with the engine running and the heater on high, and I looked down at the house. Every window was lit. There was a wreath on the door that my mother has hung every year since 1989, made of pinecones she glued together herself, and the Christmas tree was in the big front window where it always is, and I could see people moving around behind it, shapes passing back and forth, my father's broad back, a small figure that had to be Liv, who was nine now and whom I had last seen in person when she was six and had no front teeth. Down past the house, the dock ran out into the black water, white with snow.
I sat there for twenty-two minutes. I know because I watched the clock on the dashboard. I did not have a blanket. I had the box in my zipper pocket, and the five-by-seven of the Santa picture on the passenger seat beside me, because I had taken it off my refrigerator that morning at the last second, without really knowing why, and put it in my bag. I looked at it under the dome light. Truett roaring with laughter. Oren with his arm out, reaching for his hat. Me with my eyes shut and my hand on my pocket. I want my brother to open the door. And if he does? Then I want to say the right thing. I can't promise the second part. That's on you.
At five-nineteen I turned off the engine and got out and walked down the driveway in the snow.
I did not have to knock. Halfway down, the front door opened, and a rectangle of yellow light fell out across the porch and the snow, and someone stepped into it. It was not my mother. It was not my father. It was a tall, heavy-shouldered man in a gray sweater, with our grandfather's big square hands and our father's thinning blond hair, holding a dish towel, and he stood in the doorway and looked up the driveway at me, and I stopped walking.
"Liv saw your car," Torben said. "Twenty minutes ago. She's been standing on the couch at the window. She said, Aunt Greta is sitting in her car, is she sick? I said no, she's just thinking."
"I was just thinking," I said.
"It's nine degrees out."
"I know. I didn't bring a blanket. I was told to bring a blanket."
He looked at me. He didn't come down the steps and he didn't go back inside. He just stood in the open door with the warm air pouring out past him and the dish towel in his hand. Behind him, in the house, I could hear my mother saying, Torben, who is it, close the door, you're heating the whole lake, and then I heard her stop talking.
"Are you coming in?" Torben said.
"I don't know yet," I said. "I have to say something first. And I think if I come in I won't be able to say it."
He nodded slowly. He stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door almost closed behind him, so there was only a stripe of light, and stood there in his sweater in the cold with his arms folded. He waited. It occurred to me, as I stood there in the snow at the bottom of the porch steps, that my brother had always been a person who waited, and that I had always taken it for slowness, or weakness, and that I had been wrong about that, too.