He has it. It sits on the top shelf of his hall closet, two hundred and three money orders in a pair of 1998 Sorels, and the two hundred and fourth, the last one, the one I paid six dollars and forty cents toward, he picked up out of Box 1187 on the Saturday after the move, and he did not close the box after all. I asked him what he was going to do with the money, ten thousand two hundred dollars of it, all of it still good, because postal money orders never expire. He said he didn't know. He said some days he thinks he should cash it all and give it to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and some days he thinks he should give it to the Bayfront Manor activities fund, which, he pointed out to me, is a thing he had researched, and which needs a new piano. And some days, he said, he takes it down off the shelf and just reads the notes. The heron. The snow. The walk next door. Still sober.
"Mom said you'd know what to do," I told him. "She said you always decide what's right and then torture yourself doing it."
"She did say that," he said. "She wasn't wrong."
I go up to Erie once a month now. I didn't use to. I tell people it's to see my brother, and that's true. But on Sunday afternoons, before I start the long drive back down 79, I stop at Bayfront Manor on the Peninsula road, and I sign in at the desk with the nice receptionist who calls everybody hon, and I go down the long hallway that smells of floor wax and creamed corn to the room at the end, by the window that looks out over the bay. And I sit with an old man who has a crooked nose and a split eyebrow and a letter in a frame on his nightstand, and we talk. About the weather, mostly. A heron he saw from the window. Whether the lake will freeze this year. I don't ask him how he's doing with the drinking, and he doesn't make me. At the end of every visit he tells me anyway. "Still sober," he says. "Twenty-three years, two months." "Twenty-three years, three months." And something in my chest lets go for about an hour.
We don't play the radio. Neither of us has ever said why.
Last month, when I came out to the parking lot at Bayfront Manor, there was a clean gray Honda Accord parked in the far corner, under the bare maples, with the engine running and the wipers going, although it was not raining. I could see my brother in the driver's seat with his hands on the wheel at ten and two. He did not get out. He did not wave. He was just sitting there, looking at the building, at the long row of windows, at the one on the end that looks out over the bay.
I didn't go over to him. I knew better. I got in my car and started it and sat for a minute with my own hands on my own wheel. In my rearview mirror I watched him sit there. I watched him reach for the door handle, and stop, and put his hand back on the wheel, the same way I watched him stop at the post office slot, four times, in a single year.
Then I put my car in reverse and backed out and drove away and left him there, because some things you have to walk into yourself, and nobody can turn your face toward them, not even someone who loves you.
But on my way out I had stopped at the front desk, and asked the receptionist who calls everybody hon to put one more name on Virgil Haberle's visitor list, and spelled it for her twice, the way my mother used to leave the porch light on for whoever was still out in the dark.
Just in case.