They Raised the Wrong Girl, So Five Brothers Came for Me novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Five Brothers

Her five brothers watch her fix a truck and she agrees to two days in Cleveland. In the car the eldest tells her she is already engaged.

"I'm Barrett," the tall one said. "The two on the end are the twins. Then the pilot, then the baby."

"I'm twenty-two," said the baby.

"You're the baby."

I stood in the open garage door with my hair flat on one side and a crease from the laptop on my cheek.

"I'm not going to remember who's who," I said.

"That's fine," said the youngest, who had the same gray eyes as everyone else. "Nobody remembers me anyway. I'm the one with the cake."

He was holding a foil pan in both hands.

"It's lasagna," said the man next to him. "My twin made it at six this morning. Don't tell him it's lasagna, he'll cry."

"I can hear you," said the twin holding the pan.

I counted them again, because I thought I had sleep in my eyes.

Five brothers, in good coats, standing in the gravel next to my oil drums.

One of them had a phone in his hand, and the screen was open to a map of my own street.

"Why are you here?" I asked.

Barrett had a very calm voice, and he used it slowly.

"Torsten told us at breakfast yesterday that you'd ask for a number," he said. "A big one. He said to be ready."

"I'm sure he did."

"We wanted to see what number you'd pick."

The one Barrett had called the pilot hadn't said anything yet.

He was looking past me into the bay.

"There's a truck on your lift," he said.

"It's a customer's. Brake lines."

"Whose?"

"A man who sells hay," I said. "He needs it by noon."

"Do you need a hand?"

"No."

"Can we watch?"

I should have said no again.

But I had been awake for two days, and these five men were looking at me so hopefully that I couldn't say it.

"Don't touch anything," I said.

They filed into my garage and stood along the wall with their hands behind their backs.

The older twin read my tool board and said, "Everything's labeled."

"That's why it's fast."

"You'd be hell on my shipyard."

"I would," I said. "I'd fire your foreman."

The younger twin laughed so hard he nearly dropped the lasagna.

I put on my gloves, bled the lines and pulled the old rubber hose off with a wrench.

When I looked up, the pilot was holding the flashlight exactly where I needed it, and I hadn't asked.

The baby had edged up to the bench.

"Can I hold something?" he said.

"Nine-sixteenths."

He picked up the wrong wrench, and the pilot quietly put the right one in his hand.

"Don't tell Mom," the baby said. "She thinks I'm a business major."

"You are a business major," said Barrett.

"I could be a mechanic."

"You could not," said all four of his brothers at once.

I realized I was smiling with half my body under a truck.

That scared me.

I slid out on the creeper and wiped my hands, and I made myself ask.

"When did Torsten tell you about me?"

"Last Thursday," Barrett said. "He said he'd found out the week before. He told Mom first, then Eliana, then the rest of us."

Last Thursday was a week ago.

The order on my laptop was dated the third of March.

I could have told them right there, with five tall men standing in my garage.

But I had met them an hour ago, and I didn't know which of them Torsten could still talk to.

"Okay," I said.

Barrett watched my face a second longer than was comfortable.

Mom's friends at the funeral had whispered that he was a surgeon, and I believed it.

"Come to Cleveland," he said. "Two days. Mom's already made up your room, and she's cried over the towels twice."

"I have customers."

"We'll pay someone to cover the garage."

"Nobody covers my garage."

"Then we'll rent you a truck for the hay man," said the older twin.

"That's not how a truck works."

"It's how a shipyard works."

I looked at the five of them in my yard, and then through the kitchen window at the green recipe tin on the sill.

I thought about Eliana's hands holding it.

"Two days," I said. "And nobody calls me Sis."

"Sure," said the younger twin.

"Sis," said the baby, very softly, and the pilot smacked him in the back of the head.

I finished the brake job, took the hay man's check from the mailbox where he leaves it, and locked the garage.

Barrett drove me himself, in a black SUV that smelled of coffee and hospital soap, with his brothers' cars behind us in a line.

Marrow Creek went by in the window: the plant, the Dairy Barn, the church where I had buried my mother.

I kept my second phone in my coat pocket and my hand over it.

Barrett merged onto the highway and cleared his throat.

"You should know something before we get to the house," he said. "It's not my place, and Mom wanted to tell you herself."

"Tell me what?"

"You're engaged."

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