Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [24]
As she spoke, I could see her eyes darting from me to Micah and back to me again.
“You guys are brothers, right?”
We nodded.
“Twins?”
We get that quite a bit, actually. I shook my head.
“No.”
“But you’re older, right?”
“No, he is.” I grimaced.
Micah leaned in, looking inordinately pleased by her comment. Micah enjoyed the fact that nearly everyone thought he was younger than I when they saw us together.
“I’ve always told him he should take better care of himself,” he chided.
She smiled. “Are you guys married?”
“We both are,” I answered.
“Why did you come together, and not with your wives?”
We explained about our children and showed her pictures of our families. Finally, she looked up at us again.
“I think it’s great that you two are doing this together. Siblings aren’t always as close as they should be. Were you always this close?”
I hesitated.
“Not always,” I finally admitted.
In 1973, halfway through the school year, we moved to Grand Island, Nebraska. Or rather, everyone in the family except my dad moved. At the time, my mom told us that we were leaving so that my dad would be able to finish his dissertation, and we moved into a small duplex just around the corner from my mom’s parents’ house. While my dad did indeed finish his dissertation that year, he and my mother had in fact separated. It was years, however, before we ever learned the truth about this. My mom was not above keeping secrets from us if she thought the truth would hurt us.
Grand Island was a sleepy little town, nestled in the middle of the state, and as different from Los Angeles as a place could be. Wide yards separated the homes, and directly across the street from my grandparents was the elementary school we’d attend. Unlike the schools we’d been attending, Gates Elementary had massive grass fields, baseball diamonds, and—on the far side, just off the school property—a set of train tracks, where trains would come by regularly.
It didn’t take long before my brother and I were laying pennies and nickels on the tracks, waiting for the train to crush and flatten them, but unlike Los Angeles, there wasn’t much else to do in the way of exploring or getting in trouble. There weren’t any vacant, burned-out buildings in which we could build forts, there were no bridges to climb, and though there were ravens, none of them ever attacked us. As she had in Los Angeles, my mom got a job—this time as an optometrist’s assistant—and after school, we’d head to my grandparents’. There, my grandmother would make us chocolate malts and cinnamon toast (the most exquisite afternoon snack in the world) and we’d either play in the yard or go down to the basement, where my uncle Joe kept his collection of model airplanes. There were probably over a hundred models, including Spitfires and Japanese Zeros, and my uncle had assembled them as if they would someday hang in a museum. They were painted in exacting, excruciating detail, and though we weren’t allowed to touch them, we spent hours looking at them.
Entering a new school halfway through the year is always hard, and for the first couple of weeks my brother and I spent most afternoons together, as we had in Los Angeles. We discovered the parks and rode our bikes there; more often than not, we’d see dozens of other kids playing games, some of whom were in our classes. A month later, they would all be there again, sledding down the hills.
But by that age, the differences between us were becoming apparent. Micah was taller, stronger, and more athletic than I, and seemed to fear nothing. He viewed the move as a new adventure, made friends easily, and carried himself with a confidence that I found elusive. I had always been less secure than he. And I worried constantly. I worried about getting in trouble, I worried about getting good grades, and I worried what other people thought about me. I worried about