Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [38]
“Let me guess. Christine told you to ask me about this on the trip, didn’t she?”
I said nothing. Micah shifted in his seat.
“No, I go sometimes. But only because Christine wants me to. She thinks it’s important for me to go because of the kids.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Are you getting anything out of it?”
“Not really.”
“Are you praying at all?”
“I haven’t prayed in three years.”
A life without prayer is something I couldn’t imagine. In no small way, I’d been depending on prayer for as long as he’d been avoiding it.
“Don’t you feel like you’re missing something?”
“I don’t pray because it doesn’t work,” he said curtly. “Prayer doesn’t fix anything. Bad things happen anyway.”
“Don’t you think it helps you handle those bad times, though?”
He didn’t answer, and by his silence I knew he didn’t want to talk about it. Not yet, anyway.
In the end, the game was a blowout. Tampa Bay had the game in hand, and Micah and I left the bar to work out in the hotel gym during the second half. We jogged and lifted weights; afterward, we went back to our room and collapsed on the bed.
“Sorry your team lost,” I said.
“No big deal,” he said. “I’m not like you used to be. Remember? Back when you were a kid? You used to cry whenever the Vikings lost.”
The Minnesota Vikings had been my favorite team growing up; I’d picked them because it was where Dana was born.
“I remember. It broke my heart when they lost the Super Bowl.”
“Which one? They lost a bunch of them.”
“Thanks for reminding me.”
“No problem.” He paused. “You do know you were nuts when it came to the Vikings, don’t you?”
“I know. I tended to go overboard in a lot of things.”
“You still do.”
“We all have our problems. Even you.”
“That’s untrue. I’m perfectly happy. Haven’t you noticed? It was I who—through the sheer force of my buoyant personality—lifted you from the depths of despair only a couple of days ago.”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s just because we’re on the trip. You have to remember—doing something like this has always been more your style than mine. You grew up loving adventure. You used to search it out. I just tagged along, trying to keep you from getting into too much trouble.”
He grinned. “I did get into trouble a lot, didn’t I?”
“Quite a bit, actually. Especially when it came to weapons.”
A look of fond reminiscence crossed his face. “You know, I just don’t understand why that happened. I wasn’t a bad kid. I was just trying to have a good time.”
I smiled, thinking, good times indeed.
My parents, being the wise and wonderful folks they were, finally realized Micah and I weren’t exactly responsible when it came to BB guns, despite the good times we had had with them. No matter how much we begged, they refused to buy us new ones. Nor would they consider giving us rifles, when we offered that by way of compromise. Instead, they bought us bows and arrows.
We had fun with those bows. Our aim wasn’t too good, but what we lacked in accuracy, we made up for with velocity. We could send those arrows humming, practically burying them into trees. My brother took to it a bit more easily than I did, and eventually got to the point where he could actually hit a fairly large target from thirty feet away at least 5 percent of the time, as opposed to my 3 percent of the time.
“Hey, let’s put an apple on your head and I’ll try to shoot it off,” he finally suggested.
“I have a better idea,” I said, “let’s put the apple on your head.”
“Mmm. Maybe it’s not such a good idea.”
One day, when we were out with our bows and arrows in the woods, one of the arrows went astray, heading toward a group of workers that were framing a house. (In the years since we’d moved there, construction on new homes had begun in earnest.) Now, the arrow hadn’t landed too close to the workers, but it wasn’t too far away either, and one of the carpenters got pretty mad at us, even when we tried to explain that it was an accident. “Don’t even think about shooting arrows around here,” he growled, and even worse, he refused to give us the arrow back, no matter how much we pleaded.