My Father Gave Me a New Big Brother, and the Only Man I Could Run To Was the One Who Put Him There novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Night Feed

Over a bottle-fed lamb at 2 a.m. she starts a kiss and the vet stops it with a joke, and she lets herself think about the statement she signed at nineteen; at dawn she walks back into the house.

The clinic was a long metal building on the Mountain Home highway, with a gravel lot and one light over the door.

Inside it smelled of iodine and alfalfa, and it was the warmest room I had been in all night.

Mateo set the lamb's box on a stainless table under a heat lamp and mixed a bottle of replacer at the sink.

"Two ounces," he said. "Every two hours. It'll try to climb you."

"I know how to feed a lamb."

"I know you do. I'm telling it."

He wrapped my wrist in a cold pack and then his own, one-handed, and held them up side by side.

"We match," he said. "I'd call that a sign, but I'm a scientist."

It was the first time I had laughed since the dinner started.

It came out shaky, and he had the sense to look at the lamb.

I sat on a stool with the little animal in my lap, upright against my chest, and put the bottle to its mouth.

It latched and pulled so hard the nipple squeaked.

Mateo leaned on the counter across from me with his arms crossed.

He asked nothing for a long time.

That was how I knew he was going to be dangerous.

"He's my adopted brother," I said finally. "My father took him in September. He moved into the room over the kitchen on Thursday."

"Not your brother."

"Not mine."

"I have four sisters," Mateo said. "I've been a pain to every one of them. None of them ever held my wrist until I nodded."

"How do you know that's what he did?"

"You told Gorka on the sidewalk. The cook told me the rest. She heard the whole thing through the open window."

I let out a breath that was nearly a laugh.

"Is there anything this family doesn't hear through doors?"

"Not in my experience," he said. "It's the only thing Basque houses are built for."

At midnight he found me a blanket, a pillow that smelled of dog and a cot in the back room.

He said he would take the chair.

I said the cot was big enough for two.

He said, very politely, that he had met himself and would not like to be trusted with that.

At two the lamb woke us both screaming.

I carried it to the stool, and he brought the bottle, and our hands met on the bottle's neck.

He didn't move his.

Neither did I.

The heat lamp made a small gold room around us.

His hand was warm and rough, and it smelled of soap.

I could feel my own pulse in the sore place on my wrist, the one that was his now.

I looked up, and he was already looking at me.

I leaned in, and I kissed him.

His mouth was soft and surprised.

For the length of one breath he kissed me back with real hunger, his good hand coming up into my hair.

Then he stopped.

He put his forehead against mine.

"Rali," he said. "I want this so much it's embarrassing. And no."

"No?"

"You walked out of a pantry six hours ago. Right now I'm the first open door you saw."

His thumb stroked my cheekbone.

"You're a good door."

"I'd like to be a door you chose."

He smiled, crooked, with his eyes closed.

"Ask me again when you've slept and had a plate of eggs. I'll say yes so fast the lamb will file a complaint."

I sat there with my face hot and the bottle going empty.

I wasn't hurt, and I wasn't angry.

I was a little in love with being told no by someone who wanted to say yes.

He slept in the chair with his boots on.

I lay on the cot and did not sleep, because the dark has a way of bringing the one thing back.

I'll say it plainly, since it is the only thing in my life I have never said.

Five years ago this month, I was nineteen and walking home from the Ostatua at midnight after closing.

A woman crossed Grove Street ahead of me, and headlights came up out of the dark.

It was a truck, a dark one, going fast.

It hit her and threw her, and it didn't stop.

I stood behind a parked van with my hand over my mouth.

I saw the headlights and the shape of a dark truck.

I never saw the driver.

In the morning Gorka, the detective on the case, sat me down at the station.

He gave me a cup of hot chocolate and a statement to read.

He sat beside me and asked the questions in an order that made every answer yes.

He showed me a photograph of a man named Dario Ibarra, who drove a dark Ford truck.

"You saw his face under the streetlight," Gorka told me. "You just don't know you did yet."

I was nineteen, and I had never lied to anyone I loved.

I trusted him more than I trusted my own eyes.

I signed.

They convicted Dario Ibarra the next spring.

I know the dead woman's name, because it was in the paper for a week, and I have never been able to say it.

At six the sky went grey over the foothills, and my phone lit with a text from Gorka: Home safe, mija?

I didn't answer.

Mateo woke up when I stood, and he drove me back to town without asking me to stay.

He said at the curb, "Eggs, Rali. Then ask me again."

I let myself in at the front.

The dining room was dark, but the kitchen light was on.

My father sat at the long table in his bathrobe with a cup of coffee.

Aitor stood beside him, dressed, shaved, with his sleeves buttoned.

He pulled out my chair.

"Sit, little sister," he said. "You must be tired."

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