My Stepbrother Came Home for the Anniversary, and I Didn't Know Him novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Back Door
Kaisa walks into her parents' kitchen and finds the stepbrother who left five years ago grown into a stranger, he catches her wrist, and in the driveway she bites his lip bloody and tells him he doesn't get to come back.
I came through my parents' back door on Saturday with a folding chair in each hand.
Thirty-eight more were in the back of my Subaru, borrowed from the Lutheran church for the party.
The kitchen smelled like coffee, and a man I didn't know stood at the sink with his back to me.
He was tall enough that he had to bend to hold the percolator under the tap.
His gray work shirt was tight across the shoulders, and his sleeves were shoved to the elbows.
A long pink burn scar ran down his left forearm.
I stopped in the doorway, and the chairs knocked against my knees.
"Look who came home early!" my mother sang from the hall.
Diane stood in the other doorway with a dish towel wound around her fist.
She was smiling, but it was thin, and it was aimed at the back of his head.
The man turned off the water and turned around.
He had green eyes and a jaw that hadn't existed five years ago, and a dark stubble that did.
"Kay," he said.
Nobody had called me that since the day he left.
It was the family's name for me, and he had been the one who gave it to the family.
I was fifteen when my mother married his father, and Matti was seven.
I drove him to skating practice every Tuesday and checked his math at the kitchen table.
On Sundays I took him for pancakes at the diner on London Road, and he ate mine too.
I was his big sister, and that was all I ever was to him.
Then he was eighteen, and I was told he'd taken my dead father's money, and I said things in the driveway I had never taken back.
He packed a duffel bag that night.
He had not called once in five years, not to me, not when his father's heart went bad.
"Kangas," I said.
His face didn't change.
"He drove all night," my mother said, too brightly. "Arvid doesn't even know he's here. He's at the lumberyard."
"Hi, Diane," Matti said.
"Hello, sweetheart." She touched her cardigan collar, then the top button, then the collar again.
I put one chair down hard on the linoleum, and I kept the other.
"If you're staying," I said, "you can set up chairs."
He wiped his hands on his jeans and came across the kitchen.
I didn't wait for him to reach me, and I shoved the chair straight into his chest.
It hit him hard enough to move him back a step.
He caught the chair with one hand, and with the other he caught my wrist.
His fingers closed all the way around it and held.
I felt his pulse going against my pulse, fast and heavy.
His hand shook once, a single tremor that ran down to my arm.
He was angry, then, and that was good.
I was angrier.
"Let go," I said.
"Hit me again," he said. "I'll wait."
His voice was lower than I remembered, and it had gravel in it.
I looked at his mouth for a half second too long, and I hated that I had.
"Let go of my wrist, Kangas."
He let go.
My mother was twisting the dish towel into a rope.
"Why don't you two bring in the rest of the chairs," she said. "Work it out."
I walked out of the kitchen with my wrist burning.
The October wind off the river came up the driveway and smelled like wet leaves.
I got the Subaru's hatch open and pulled out four chairs at once.
Boots crossed the gravel behind me.
"I'll take those," Matti said.
"I don't need help."
"I didn't ask if you did."
He reached past me for the chairs, and I slammed the hatch down on his hand.
It came down an inch from his fingers.
He didn't flinch, and that made me angrier than if he had.
He dropped the chairs on the gravel.
Then he took both my wrists and walked me backward until the Subaru's door was against my spine.
He pinned them on the cold glass over my head, one in each hand.
He was so much bigger than the boy who used to hold my hand crossing London Road.
His whole body was an inch from mine, and I could feel the heat coming off him through his shirt.
"Say it again," he said.
"Say what."
"What you said to me in this driveway."
I looked up into his face, and his eyes were dark green and furious and very close.
I remembered every word of it.
I'd said I wasn't his sister and that he was a liar and a thief and not to come back.
I leaned up until my mouth was an inch from his, and he stopped breathing.
Then I bit his lower lip.
I bit down until I tasted copper and felt his whole body jerk against mine.
He made a low, rough sound in his chest, and his hands tightened on my wrists.
I let go and said it against his bleeding mouth.
"You don't get to come back."
I ducked under his arm, got into the Subaru and started the engine.
His blood was still on my teeth when I backed out of my mother's driveway.
In the mirror he stood in the gravel with the chairs at his feet, touching his lip.
Then he looked at his fingers, and he smiled.
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