That was a Friday. On Monday morning at a quarter to nine I was standing on the sidewalk on East Sixth Street with two cups of coffee from the Sheetz on Buffalo Road, waiting for a man from the church with a van, and at five minutes to nine a clean gray Honda Accord pulled up behind me and parked, and my brother got out in jeans and a Cathedral Prep sweatshirt that had to be twenty years old, and stood next to me on the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets, and did not explain himself, and I did not ask.
He carried the boxes. He did not carry the old man; that was me and the man from the church, whose name was Ignatz and who had been Virgil's sponsor for nineteen years and who looked at my brother the whole morning like a man watching a deer walk out of the woods into a parking lot. Eamon carried every box down the four porch steps, and the recliner, and a lamp with a fringed shade, and a framed photograph of a dark-haired woman in a 1960s wedding dress who I understood without asking had been Virgil's wife, and whose death, I would learn later, in the spring of 2003, was when the drinking had gone from bad to everything. Eamon did not speak to Virgil once. Virgil did not speak to him. But when the last box was in the van and Eamon came back up the steps to check the empty apartment, I saw the two of them in the doorway, the old man on his cane and my brother in his sweatshirt, standing about a yard apart in the bare front room with the rectangles of brighter wallpaper where the pictures had been. Neither of them said anything. Then Eamon nodded, once, and Virgil nodded back, and that was all, and it was not forgiveness and I knew better than to call it that. But it was not nothing.
I drove back to Columbus on Thursday. The house on Liberty Street went on the market the following week.
I don't know what my brother is going to do with the boot box.
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