Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [60]
While we were eating, Jill Hannah, the physician, joined us. Over the past few days, she’d been busy, since so many people were developing stomach problems. Like everyone, she seemed lethargic, and when we mentioned we were going out that night, she raised her eyebrows.
“Aren’t you guys tired?”
“A little,” Micah answered. “But you should come, too. It’ll be fun.”
“Thanks, but I’m going to bed. Is anyone else going with you?”
“We’ll see,” Micah said. “We’re going to ask around in a little while.”
Not surprisingly, most everyone we asked said no, no matter how fun we tried to make it sound. We must have spoken to a couple of dozen people, but only Charles, one of the lecturers on the tour, said he’d come. We told him that we’d meet him in the lobby at eight.
“We’re just going to take a short nap,” Micah said, “and we’ll see you then.”
We headed back to our room, lay down, and fell fast asleep, neither of us waking until the following morning.
At breakfast, Charles came over to our table. “Where were you guys last night? I was waiting for you. I was all set to have a great time.”
“Sorry about that,” Micah said sheepishly.
“I can’t believe the brothers Sparks actually got tired.”
“Sometimes,” Micah said, “it happens to the best of us.”
As soon as Charles left, I leaned toward Micah. “I can’t believe we slept through it. I guess we’re getting older, huh?”
“I know what you mean. In college, it seemed like I never got tired. I could go out all night long. I was wild.”
“College?” I asked. “Who are you kidding? You were wild in high school.”
In 1979, Micah began high school, and for the next two years my brother had a tenuous relationship with everyone in the family. He’d reached the age where he began to openly question my parents’ authority, and acted out accordingly. Yet Micah, as probably could have been expected, was more, even when it came to being a teenager. He got drunk at the river, and my mom once found marijuana in the pocket of his jeans and grounded him for a month after threatening him with military school. At fifteen, Micah also came home with a pierced ear; my mom made him remove the earring by issuing yet another threat about military school.
She always threatened us with military school. Both of our parents had gone to boarding school and each of them had shared their horror stories, always ending with, “but at least it wasn’t military school.” As kids, we were terrified at the thought of these institutions, believing they’d been designed by Satan himself. But Micah was listening to our parents less and less, and he’d come to realize that he’d never actually be sent away, if only because the family couldn’t afford it. Thus, his behavior got worse and worse. During his freshman year, the mood in the house was extremely tense, and my sister and I were often amazed at the way he boldly raised his voice to our mom and dad.
Image is important to most teenagers, and Micah was no exception. He was tired of being poor, and even worse, looking poor. At sixteen, he got a job as a dishwasher at an ice cream parlor, and began saving his money. He bought a used car and learned how to repair it, he bought new clothes, and began dating. He soon became serious with a girl named Juli and began spending all his free time with her. My mom didn’t think it was a good idea to be so serious about a girl at such a young age, and they argued about that as well. Once, she caught the two of them napping in his room, and all hell broke loose. I don’t think I’d ever seen my mother angrier about anything.
It was around that time that my mom marched into my dad’s office. My dad had been all but irrelevant when it came to raising us, but my mom could go no further without his help.
“I raised them this far,” she said. “Now it’s your turn.”
My dad simply nodded. It was, he probably thought, a lot better than cooking or cleaning.
After that, I remember evenings where I’d find Micah sitting in the office, visiting with my dad. My dad was exceptionally smart, and he read almost constantly. He taught behavioral