He’d decided to wait to tell his family he was home. Get past the holidays, at least—there’d been enough drama. So what an unwelcome sight it was,

his brother striding into the bar like a bright sun on a hungover morning. Mike fended him off with one hand, drunker than he’d meant to be. The place was mostly empty. It was barely noon.

“When were you going to tell us you were home?” Sam demanded.

His voice was loud. His freshly shorn hair gave him an even cleaner, more boyish aspect than Mike remembered. Gina, Mike’s barmaid du jour, stood twenty feet away, frozen in place with a plate of gyro and fries.

“Yeah,” Mike muttered. “Yeah, I was going to tell you, but”—he waved his arm, Ta-da!—“you found me first. Good for you.”

Sam exhaled through his nostrils.

“Goddammit, Mike. Gerry Winthrop told Mom she saw you sitting on a park bench, like a homeless person.”

Gina delivered her order and approached them. A cool expression was clamped over her obvious curiosity.

“Is this your brother?” She put a hand on Mike’s arm. He ignored her. “I was getting to it,” Mike said.

“Mike?” Gina prompted.

“Yeah, yeah, this is my brother. He’s a douchebag.”

Mike willed his tongue free of the weight slurring his words. He was vaguely aware of Gina stepping back, taking in Sam’s crisp, Yuppie clothes and young Republican haircut. Was that a beeper on his belt?

“A pleasure to meet you,” Sam said curtly.

“See?” Mike said, leaning toward Gina, raising his eyebrows. He mimicked Sam’s clipped phrasing, “A pleasure to meet you.”

“Jesus Christ. You’re too loaded to talk to. And you”—Sam snapped his gaze toward Gina—“why are you serving him? Can’t you tell he’s had more than enough?”

“He’s a grown up,” Gina said.

“Hardly,” Sam replied. “Mike, Mom’s going nuts. Where are you living?” He didn’t have to answer that. He wouldn’t.

It was a note from his mother that finally swayed him, addressed to the Attention of Mr. Michael Albion Smith, c/o The Lost Dog. Gina had rescued it from the trash along with some unpaid bills. The sight of his mother’s Palmer method handwriting on an embossed envelope smeared with coffee grounds embarrassed him, as if he’d pushed her bodily into the mud.

For the visit he spiffed up in a new button-down, sleeves rolled over his tattoos. The story they told wasn’t one his family wanted to see or discuss—interlocking edges of jagged metal scrolling from shoulder to wrist, the faces of the dead framed in black ink.

Mike noted the improvements since he’d last been home, more than three years ago, now. The driveway was covered in crushed stone, a flagstone path led from the house to his father’s workshop. Large planters flanked the front door, decked for the season with pine boughs and holly. A single electric candle stood in each window. Promptly at sundown, he knew, his mother would go from room to room, plugging them in.

Inside the house, smells of cinnamon and evergreen. Mike shook his father’s calloused hand, hugged his mom, tiny and brittle boned, her hair a blonde-turning-silver bob. She was dressed in a red Talbot’s sweater and pearls. Albion wore his uniform, blue work pants and an L.L. Bean chamois shirt. Mike gave Jen, his sister-in-law, a nod. She sat in a high-backed settee, and Sam stood alongside her, as if they were posing for a portrait.

“You’re looking well, Michael,” Albion said, in his formal way. His mother, Gladys, nodded vehemently, gesturing toward the dining room. Thomas Mosier furniture on a hand-loomed rug, a mantel laden with silver candlesticks, the whole scene a magazine-approved take on upper middle class New England living. A ceramic bowl of raspberries was placed on a runner next to a basket of fresh shortbread draped with a checkered napkin. Another bowl crested with just-whipped cream.

“They aren’t in season, but I know they’re your favorite,” Gladys said. “I made an apple pie too.”

Jen rolled her eyes. Sam gave her shoulder an admonishing squeeze and came forward to greet Mike.

“Glad you could make it, buddy.”

As if he hadn’t brokered the deal. But Mike had agreed to it, early afternoon, before the cellular surge toward cocktail hour made him shaky and irascible. Two hours, tops. No bullshit.

He felt like a grown man in a child’s playhouse. His bulk expanded to crush low supporting beams, oak doors with cast iron latches, spindle-backed chairs— all the tasteful, appropriate fittings of this house where he had once fit inside the frame. His brother’s boys, Joshua and Eli, were outside in snow pants and mittens, engaged in a furious debate about which direction the old tree swing should go. They spun in circles, their faces condensed with determination, pushing against each other. Mike knocked on the window, waved at them, and they broke for long enough to return his greeting.

“Just like you two used to be,” his mother said, smiling. Jen frowned. Albion warmed his haunches against the wood stove, silent. Sam helped himself to a fingerful of whipped cream.

Mike felt some kind of intervention brewing. His palms itched, and his throat and face got hot.

Albion cleared his throat. “Michael, come on out to the shop with me.

There’s something I’d like to show you.”

“I’ll start the coffee,” his mother said, hurrying off to the kitchen. Mike met Sam’s eyes. Sam gave a small, duplicitous shrug.

Albion was already out the front door. “I said no bullshit,” Mike whispered.

Sam made an exasperated face. “It’s fine,” he said. “Just go.”

Mike exited, following his father, noticing the stiffness in his gait. Years of physical work had taken their toll. They walked along the path to the shop, and when Albion swung open the door, Mike anticipated the familiar smell of wood chips and diesel fuel, varnish and iron. Like his father, he was good with his hands. That boat shop odor had always made him eager to take his place among men who knew how to do for themselves.

For themselves, he’d tried to explain, that tense, awful summer of his junior year before the accident that claimed three of his friend’s lives. Not for others. Not for people who spent the winters in Barbados or Vale. Not for people who said the word Harvard with gloating self-regard, looking around to see who could match their pedigree. Mike heard the condescension seeping through their fond remarks: “How would we get by without you, Albion.”

He hated how his father absorbed the snubs and slights of the summer people who kept him on retainer like a valet. He’d refused to work for the family business that summer—he was cut out for something better than replacing cedar shake shingles on the mansions the Point families called “cottages.” He delighted in trespassing, on their homes, their daughters. He went through rich girls like Kleenex, just for the satisfaction of seeing them cry.

But Albion knew every degree below freezing on the thermometer. Fighting him was fighting the cold, a winter that could persist indefinitely. Mike had only wanted to see him thaw, to see some gap in that formidable self-control.

“High school was getting rid of a bunch of old machines and such,” Albion said slowly, as if speaking a sentence required a great effort—an unseemly waste of a man’s resources.

Mike entered the shop. In the far corner, glinting and freshly oiled, was the printing press from his high school’s art room.

“They got some kind of funding for new equipment. Really cleaned the place out,” his father said. “Biology labs too. I can’t guess what they did with all that taxidermy.” Mike acknowledged the joke with a duck of his head. “I don’t know where you’d put the thing, but I hated to see it go to waste.”

“You’re so talented, Michael,” his mother had said, the first time they took him to dry out, halfway through his senior year. She’d reached out to touch his face and he’d pulled away, shouldering his bag. Albion said nothing. To him, the very word “talent” offered up a vulgar, vaudevillian license to misbehave.

And yet here it was, another sacrifice on the altar of his so-called talent: it had taken countless hours, Mike knew, to restore the old machine.

What he meant to say was, “Thank you.”

What came out—forced through the twists and turns of the decade since he’d woken from that first blackout, hugging his knees in the bathtub while an icy shower poured over his head, his mother making a pot of coffee—was, “Don’t know what I’d use it for.”

Tanya Whiton’s fiction has been featured in Collateral, CutBank, Fanzine, and the Cincinnati Review, among other publications. She is co-writer and an associate producer of the documentary feature The Zen Speaker, and is currently adapting the memoir Sailing at the Edge of Disaster for a limited television series.