that’s mine.” The woman slipped her Granny Smith, now very shiny, into her handbag before leaning close to her acquaintance. “By the way, on the plane with that guy, what I really couldn’t stand? Was the smell.”
I was relieved the woman’s suitcase had arrived, since the pariah whom she and her seatmate had so cruelly disparaged must have been the very large gentleman whom two flight attendants were rolling into baggage claim in an extra-wide wheelchair. A curious glance in the heavy passenger’s direction pierced me with a sympathy so searing I might have been shot. Looking at that man was like falling into a hole, and I had to look away because it was rude to stare, and even ruder to cry.
Yo, don’t recognize your own brother?”
Wheeling to the familiar voice at my shoulder was like striding through a sliding door and smacking flat into plate glass. The smile I’d prepared in welcome crumpled. The muscles around my mouth stiffened and began to twitch.
“… Edison?” I peered into the round face, its features stretched as if painted on a balloon. Searching the brown eyes, nearly black now so hooded, I think I was trying not to recognize him. The longish hair was lank, too dull. But the keyboard grin was unmistakable—if sulfurous from tobacco, and tinged with a hint of melancholy along with the old mischief. “Sorry, but I didn’t see you.”
“Find that hard to believe.” Somewhere under all that fat was my brother’s sense of humor. “Don’t I get a hug?”
“Of course!” My hands nowhere near met on his curved back, the form soft and warm, but foreign. This time when he embraced me, he didn’t lift me off the floor. Once we disengaged and I met his gaze, my chin rose only slightly. Edison had once been three inches taller than I, but he was no more. It was now less physically natural to look up to my brother.
“Do you—did you not need that wheelchair, then?”
“Nah, that was just the airline being impatient. Don’t walk fast as I used to.” Edison—or the creature that had swallowed Edison—heaved toward the baggage belt. “But I thought you didn’t see me.”
“It’s been over four years. I guess it took me a minute. Please, let me take that.” He allowed me to shoulder his battered brown bag. Visiting my brother in New York, I’d trailed after his ground-eating galumph, nervous of getting left behind in a strange city as he threaded nimbly through slower pedestrians without colliding with lit cigarettes. Yet walking with him toward the airport exit, I was obliged to employ the step-close, step-close of a bride down the aisle.
“So how was your flight?” Dull, but my mind was spinning. Edison had stirred a range of emotions in me over the years: awe, humility, frustration (he never shut up). But I had never felt sorry for my brother, and the pity was horrible.
“Plane could take off,” he grunted. “Even with me on it. That what you mean?”
“I didn’t mean anything.”
“Then don’t say anything.”
I’m not supposed to say anything. I was already climbing the steep learning curve of an alien modern etiquette. Edison could crack wise at his own expense, and had he shown up in a form bearing some passable resemblance to the brother I remembered he most certainly would have hounded me about my hips. But when your brother shows up at the airport weighing hundreds more pounds than when last you met, you don’t say anything.
We finally reached the exit. I said, casually, why don’t I bring the car around, though I was parked only a hundred yards away. A middle-aged woman with smartly cut auburn hair who’d been loitering by the information booth had followed us outside—confirming my suspicion that Edison and I were being stared at.
“Sorry to bother you,” said the stranger. “But are you by any chance Pandora Halfdanarson?”
For many a younger sibling with an older brother looking on, being solicited for an autograph, or whatever this woman wanted, would be a fantasy come true. But not today, and I came close to denying I was any such person just to get away. On the other hand, explaining to Edison why I’d lied would make a bigger mess, so I said yes.
“I thought so!” said the woman. “I recognized your face from the profile in Vanity Fair. Well, I just had to tell you: my husband gave me a Baby Monotonous doll for our anniversary. I don’t know if you remember it—well, of course not, you must make so many—but it’s wearing a stiff suit and snooty hat, and the TV remote is stitched in one hand. It says things like, George! You know you’re supposed to cut down on salt! And George! You know I can’t bear that shirt! And George! You know you don’t understand Middle Eastern politics! Or sometimes it preens, I went to Bryn Maaaaaaaawr! I was offended at first, but then I just had to laugh. I’d no idea I was so critical and controlling! That doll helped save my marriage. So I wanted to thank you.”
Don’t get me wrong: I’m usually very nice to satisfied customers. I might not enjoy being recognized in public as much as some people would—as much as Edison would—but I don’t take any la-di-da status for granted. The main thing that rattles me about such encounters is the embarrassment: this woman recognized me and I didn’t recognize her, which didn’t seem right. So usually I’d have been warm and chatty and grateful, but not today. I shook off the fan mumbling, “Well, I’m very happy for you, then,” and pivoted to the crosswalk.
“Is it true?” the woman cried at my back. “You’re Travis Appaloosa’s daughter?”
Annoyed, since I’d not told that to Vanity Fair and the journalist dug it up anyway, I declined to answer. Edison boomed behind me, “Got that ass-backwards, lady. Travis Appaloosa is Pandora Halfdanarson’s father. Which is eating the fucker hollow.”
Fortunately, when I drove up to the curb she’d cleared off. Hefting his bag into the back, I said, “Sorry about that woman. Honestly, that hardly ever happens.”
“Price of fame, babe!” His tone was opaque.
It took some doing to get the front passenger seat of our Camry to go back to its last notch. Climbing inside, Edison braced one hand on the door; I worried whether the hinges could take the stress. I’d have helped him myself, but I didn’t think he could lean on me without us both collapsing. He lowered himself into the bucket seat with the delicacy of a giant crane maneuvering haulage from a container ship. When he dropped the last few inches, the chassis tilted to the right. His knees jammed the glove compartment, and I had to give his door an extra oomph to get it shut. Those heavy hips were good for something.
I had trouble releasing the parking brake, with Edison’s thigh pressed against it, and getting the gearshift out of park was hampered by the spill of his forearm. I was desperate to call Fletcher and warn him, though advance notice that the brother-in-law who had shown up at the airport looked thrice the size of the brother-in-law he’d once hosted would have been useless. As I pulled from the lot, my phone rang, and I recognized the caller. After our curbside encounter with that Baby Monotonous fan, this was the last thing we needed, and I didn’t answer.
Edison rustled into the pockets of his black leather jacket—the hip kind with lapels, though this one would have required the benevolence of half a cow. I recognized it as a replacement of the calf-length leather trench coat that he’d worn for years, with a tie-belt, soft as the skin of an eggplant, always worn with the collar raised. He’d looked so cool in it, so Mafioso mysterious and—sleek. I wondered what happened to the original, out of nostalgia, but also because whether Edison had kept his smaller clothes might be a key to how he saw his future. This wider, unfitted jacket had more the texture of plastic, and none of the fine styling of his old trademark. I’d no idea where one got such clothes; I’d never seen apparel that size in Kohl’s, or even at Target.
He withdrew what looked like a mashed Cinnabon, the white frosting