“It’s not about being good or bad,” Ben said. “It’s about being afraid of what you’ll feel if you can’t feel hurt and anger.”

“I thought your night classes were in business, little brother, not psychology.”

For a few moments we listened to a silence that stretched across a continent.

“So why did you really call?”

“I talked to Dr. Rogers yesterday,” Ben said. “He thinks Daddy will need the most help in the fall. I’ll be out of the army at the end of October. I was supposed to take a job here with an insurance company. I talked to them, and they can hold the position until January. Lee Ann will stay here with the baby while I stay with Daddy. But he may live longer than the doctors think or get sicker sooner.”

“And if that happens you want me to take care of him.”

“Yes. Aunt Margaret’s too old to do it by herself.”

“And if I don’t?”

“He’ll be put in the hospital or a nursing home. You know he doesn’t want that. He’s the same as Momma.”

“I can’t do it.”

“Can’t or won’t? . . . Well?” Ben asked when I didn’t reply.

“It’s late here, Ben,” I said, “and I have a full day tomorrow. Tell Lee Ann hello for me.”

The afternoon Luke had first visited the house, Daddy and I wounded each other as best we could while Momma lay dying in the next room. We’d given voice to every spiteful, hateful thought our hearts had held for each other. Had used up years of them in those few minutes.

Yet our hearts weren’t empty. It was as if we had miscalculated how much we could say to each other and still have enough resentment left to cover what lay deepest, what could only be expressed with words of reconciliation and forgiveness—words that acknowledged we were bonded by blood and family and, as much as we might wish otherwise, even love. Words so frightening we sealed our mouths tight, risked not a syllable of that language. Because we both realized once you open your mouth to speak such words you open your heart too. You open it wide as a barn door and you take off the hinges and then anything could get out or in, and what can be more frightening than that?

Ben had been the same way. All those years he’d never once given voice to the pain he felt, whether it was pain from another skin graft or from a classmate’s cruelty. Maybe that was what happened when people grew up in a place where mountains shut them in, kept everything turned inward, buffered them from everything else. How long did it take before that landscape became internalized, was passed down generation to generation like blood type or eye color?