Daddy always made it worse. Before every skin graft he would tell Ben this one was going to make all the difference. When it didn’t make much of a difference at all, Daddy would insist it had, though you could see the disappointment in his eyes even as he said it. And still he couldn’t keep himself from going into a rage when he’d find Ben in his room nights there was a ball game or dance. You’d think Ben wanted to stay in his room just to spite him, and all the while Momma saying nothing.

And Ben never telling Daddy to go to hell or even saying no. When I tried to stand up for him, Ben would say It’s okay, Maggie, and that made it worse for me.

I remembered the summer days spent in a cave where people once lived in darkness, a place where he could not be seen by anyone, not even himself.

Now my brother was on the phone, his voice crossing two time zones.

“We need to talk about Daddy,” Ben said.

“Did he tell you I’d been up there?”

“Yes, but he didn’t say a lot except you only stayed one night.”

“So he didn’t tell you about our little row.”

The line was silent for a few moments.

“Can’t you just let it go, Maggie?” Ben said, his voice almost a whisper.

“Why just me? He can’t let go of things either.”

“He’s dying,” Ben said.

I thought of Ben’s hand holding the phone against his ear, his right hand pressed against his scarred cheek. My brother said he was happy now and I believed him, because despite everything that had happened, happiness and forgiveness were his natural states of being. He had a wife and baby and was finishing up a four-year hitch in the military. More cosmetic surgery had been done once he joined the army, and the scars were less visible. You had to look carefully now to realize he’d been scarred not by acne but by boiling liquid.

“Are you listening to me, Maggie?” Ben asked.

“Yes. But it’s not just about him and me. It’s about how he treated you.”

“He was angry at himself, frustrated he couldn’t do anything to make it better for me.”

“So if you can’t make something better you make it worse.”

“We’ve been over this before. He couldn’t help it. I knew that even as a kid, Maggie. I think you did too.”

“He could help it,” I said. “He could have thought less about his own feelings and more about yours. It was the same with Momma’s cancer.”

“Sometimes you have to forgive people,” Ben said.

“Maybe I’m not like you,” I said. “Maybe I’m not as good a person as you are.”