by Mia Dalia                                                                         

I’ve never believed in that eyes-are-the-windows-to-the-soul bullshit. Never gave much credence to the concept of soul in general. Me, I’m a practical man. If I can’t drink it, smoke it, buy it, or sell it, it’s no good to me. All the crap crooners croon about, love and the rest of it, well, that’s just fairy tales people come up with to distract themselves from the unpalatable facts of life.

My kid brother Billy calls me a cynic. I can live with that. But then I look into his eyes—same wide open baby blues as our dearly departed mother—and feel a twinge of something one could, in a pinch, describe as a warm and fuzzy feeling.

Promptly, I punch that feeling down the same way I will any man who suggests its existence, stomping on it for good measure once it’s on the ground. Because Billy is too soft for this world, and I’m not getting dragged down to that level. Soft is as good as stupid. That’s the main reason there’s a finger-smudged ballistic glass between my cynical brown eyes and his big blue ones right now.

“I can’t bail you out or anything,” I tell him, shaking my head, feeling useless. The timing alone … my construction gig has been cutting hours, and I haven’t done anything less than legal in months. To make matters worse, Gina has finally seen the error of her ways—or rather mine—and booted me to the curb. Well, technically, to my buddy’s couch, but it offers about the same degree of comfort, albeit upholstered in cigarette-burned chenille.

I’ve got a crick in my neck and a wind whistling through my wallet. This is no time for Billy to go breaking the law.

I never wanted this life for him, always knew he wasn’t cut out for it. When he first picked up the guitar, I thought it was a perfect fit for a long-fingered, long-haired kid like him.

Kid. Our ten-year age difference has always made it impossible to think of him as anything else, though he is a grown man now—a grown man in an orange jumpsuit.

***

Billy started a band in his junior year of high school—Faithless, after our mother’s name. I figured he was trying to find her in his way, get her to come back or something. I was nearly old enough to drive and vote by the time she left, but Billy was only seven, and it did a number on him.

Ask me, and I’ll tell you she’s dead, because to me she’s as good as—just another groupie who tried to quit the road and failed, lured away from the PTA and coupon clipping by the siren song of a sweet bass line and a tour bus’s brakes screeching. But Billy is still looking for her, at every show his band plays, at every tour stop.

Faithless never got big, but it managed to eclipse the local bar scene and even travel some up and down the coast in a beat-up old school bus converted to purpose. They got signed to a small label record a while back, put a couple of records out. Blues-rock, that sort of thing.

I’ve kept tabs on Billy the entire time, but there’s been a distance between us that has nothing to do with geography. The older he gets, the less I want him to end up like me, so I keep him at arm’s length. We get together now and again, have a few beers. He tells me about what he’s been up to, and I strategically avoid doing the same. We don’t talk about Mom, but it’s there, in the shadows of our omissions. We give each other brisk, back-slapping hugs, as if to assure ourselves of our corporality, and off we go our separate ways, back to our separate lives.

It works. Or has worked, until now.

***

“I don’t expect you to bail me out,” my brother says to me, tucking his blonde hair behind his ears. “Or anything.”

Unlike the hooded-eyed, pugilistic-nosed, stubbled mug that greets me daily in the mirror, Billy’s got the face of a teen idol. It’s good for the concert stage, but a terrible thing in lockup, liable to get him all kinds of wrong attention.

I sigh. “Wanna tell me what happened?”

“I found her,” he says, his expression unreadable. “I found Mom.”

Something about those words makes me want to take the old-school phone receiver and slam it against the glass between us until it splinters, until it shatters like our lives did after Mom left. All wasted, like my football college scholarship; all ruined, like Billy’s childhood. I still my hands and bite the inside of my cheek until I taste pennies.

“Where?”

“Philly. She was working the bar at this seedy club we played. You should’ve seen her; she’s hardly changed at all.”

The woman I knew was a heavy smoker and drinker, so I doubt that very much, but I suppose between Billy’s rose-colored glasses and the customary low lighting of a typical bar, that’s one version of the truth.

“You two talk?”

A shadow passes over Billy’s usually sunny-side-up face.

“She didn’t recognize me,” he says quietly, looking down at his hands. “The first thing she said to me after all these years was, ‘It’s five for the beer, but the shot’s on me, ‘cause I like your band’s name. And if you play some old-school blues, the next one’s on me too.’ Can you believe it?”

He’s looking up at me now, and yes, I can absolutely believe it. Beneath her easy, devil-may-care charm, Mom’s always had a selfish, casually cruel streak. Not a thing a kid can recognize, but as an adult, you see it around every corner.

“What’d you do?”

“Paid and left, what else?”

“No blues for her?”

Billy shakes his head, his smile’s a frown now. “I followed her that night. After her shift ended.”

Nothing good has ever started off with those words. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I guess I was curious. She had this ghost of a shiner on her face. I wanted to make sure she was okay, you know?”

My kid brother, always the good guy. A losing game in this world.

I wait for him to continue.

“She walked to this really sketchy-looking neighborhood. A small, decrepit-looking row home. Trash out front, crumbling stoop, bars on the windows, crooked blinds with missing slats. I couldn’t believe …”

Billy chokes up, but I get his meaning. He couldn’t believe she left us for a life that ugly. But I can. I’ve seen enough bad choices not to let it surprise me.

If I had my druthers, this would be where my brother tells me he spat on the ground and walked away. But then, of course, he wouldn’t be wearing orange right now.

***

See, the thing with good people is they expect everyone else to be good too. They believe in things like kindness, reason, closure. Something tells me Billy went up those crumbling steps and rang the doorbell. But no, he says, he didn’t even get a chance. While he was standing there, psyching himself up, a fight broke out in the house. Soon enough, its thin walls couldn’t hold it.

“She storms out. A man comes after her, calling, ‘Come back, Faith. We ain’t done here.’ His eyes are bloodshot, tattoos spilling out across his skin, everywhere that isn’t covered by an old pair of jeans and a wife-beater. It doesn’t take much imagination to tell that’s where that shiner on Mom’s face came from. She sees me and for a moment …”

Billy pauses. If I had a heart, the expression in his eyes right now would just about break it.

“For a moment, I think she recognizes me, but she just says, ‘Boy from the band, you following me?’ And the man starts screaming, ‘Is that him? Is that him?’ He shoves me, then shoves Mom hard enough to send her flying to the dirty pavement. And then I must—” Billy wrings his hands, those long, guitar-calloused fingers “—I must’ve shoved him back without thinking. There is this wet crack, like when we used to kick in Halloween pumpkins. I realize that’s his skull hitting the curb. And then blood, so much blood.  Mom’s screaming her head off, but it sounds far away, like I’m underwater. I see all the neighbors’ lights come on. I know some of them must be calling the police, but. I can’t think. I can’t move. Finally, the cops get there, sirens are going off, lights are flashing, and I find my voice and say to Mom, ‘I’m Billy. It’s me, Billy.’”

The saddest story I’ve ever heard, and I already know the ending, but I wait for it anyway.

After a beat, my brother shakes his head heavily and finishes, “’Well, Billy,’ she tells me, ‘you shoulda stuck to the blues.’”

Photo by Austin Prock on Unsplash