Thomas Cook - Red Leaves

Our house, when I think of it now, had that same determined sturdiness. It was built of ancient wood, rough-hewn and very nearly petrified. The living-room ceiling rose at a forty-five-degree angle, supported by thick beams, and at the end of it there was a fireplace of gray stone. The grounds were also incontestably the product of a mind that sought security. The yard was thick with trees and wild brush that made it impossible to see the house from the road. An unpaved drive wound in a long lazy circle to the front of the house, then lifted up a short hill and circled back to the main road. It was possible to make the turn into the driveway and immediately disappear into densely covering forest. Save for that one break in the trees, no one would even have suspected that a family lived nearby. We lived on a desert island, as Meredith once said, in the middle of the woods.

I'd put on a couple of extra burgers because Warren had called earlier, sounding tired from his long day of house painting. I knew he hated spending Friday night alone, so I'd invited him over for a cookout. In recent weeks, he'd begun to drink more, and his fleeting efforts to "find the right woman" had declined both in number and intensity. The year before he'd fallen off a ladder while repairing a patch of rotted shingles on the small two-story house he rented. The fall had broken his hip and he'd been laid up for nearly a month. There'd been no one to look after him, no wife or children, and so he'd moved into Keith's room for his convalescence, a period during which he'd played computer games and watched videos, usually adventure movies because, as he put it with a soft, self-mocking smile, "I have a lot to keep my mind off of."

He arrived at just before five, moving sluggishly up the winding walkway that led to the grill. Around him, in the lowering sun, the leaves were so brilliantly colored that he seemed to walk through a shimmering oil painting. The foliage had always been spectacular, but I most admired the Japanese maple I'd planted at the end of the walkway, its graceful branches, laden with red leaves, spread out like enveloping arms that seemed to draw you into its protective care.

"So, hows the chef?" Warren asked as he plopped down in a lawn chair a few feet from Meredith.

Meredith put down her magazine. "He's only the summer chef," she said lightly. "He doesn't lift a finger when he's not at that grill." She pulled herself out of the hammock. "Got to get dressed," she said, then bounded into the house.

"Dressed for what?" Warren asked.

"Department meeting," I said.

The phone rang inside the house, and through the front window I saw Keith rush to pick it up, his movement considerably more sprightly than normal, so that I briefly sensed that the person at the other end might be the long-awaited girlfriend he'd no doubt been pining for. He talked briefly, then put the phone down and came to the door.

"Okay if I babysit tonight?" he asked. "Mrs. Giordano can't get her usual one."

I knew that Karen Giordano usually employed Beth Carpenter to babysit when she and Vince went out, but she sometimes called Keith when Beth wasn't available. He had filled in four or five times before that night, always home before eleven, usually with some story about Amy, how bright and well-behaved she was, deserving of the name he'd given her—Princess Perfect.

"You caught up with your homework?" I asked.

"Except algebra," Keith said. "Besides, it's Friday, Dad. I have the whole weekend." He frowned as if I'd missed a cue. "So, can I?"

I shrugged. "Okay."

Keith returned inside, where I glimpsed him through the window once again, speaking into the phone, a tall lanky boy of fifteen with a mop of curly black hair and skin so pale and soft to the touch it seemed very nearly feminine.

"You got a good kid there, Eric," Warren said. He glanced over at the grill. "Smells good."

We gathered around the picnic table a few minutes later. Meredith was dressed in her professorial attire, complete with a silk scarf and black pumps with a modestly high heel. Keith wore his usual jeans and sweatshirt along with the pair of worn tennis shoes he usually wore unlaced.

I remember that the conversation was rather limited that evening. I mentioned a roll of film I'd developed that morning, twenty-four pictures of the same goldfish. Meredith said that she'd come to like Dylan Thomas more than in the past, particularly his poem about a little girl who'd died by fire in London. "He was asked to write a poem about this one little girl," she said, "but refused to do that and wrote something universal instead."

Warren mostly complained that his hip still bothered him and that he might well require surgery in a year or two. He had always been one who needed sympathy, and sought it, the kind of man you'd think had been orphaned in his youth and thus was forever in search of a sweet maternal hand. My father had always found him soft and without ambition, called him "day labor" behind his back, and warned my mother not to baby him, one of the few of his commands she had had the will to disobey.

As for Keith, he seemed even more quiet than usual, his head low over his plate, as if vaguely ashamed to look us in the eye. He had always been a shy boy, awkward and withdrawn, prone to injury, and with an early dislike of physical contact. He'd shunned sports, but not out of regard for some other activity, playing a musical instrument, for example, or because of some interest or hobby, but only because he seemed wary of being touched. But more than anything, he gave off a sense of something enclosed, drawn in upon itself, disinclined to reach out.

Meredith had more than once asked if I thought Keith should see someone. I was not averse to such a suggestion, but at the same time I had no idea whom Keith might see. And of course, the real question, it seemed to me, was not whether he was involved in sports or had friends, but whether he was or wasn't happy. But I had no way of knowing this, and so I let him drift, the first years of his adolescence passing quietly, almost silently, until they reached the end of that summer, and he sat, hunched over his plate, while Meredith raced to her meeting and Warren slumped in the hammock and I cleared the table and cleaned the grill.

"So, you gonna take me?" Keith asked as he came out of the house, now dressed for that cool autumn evening in khaki pants, wool shirt, and blue parka.

"You look very handsome," I said.

He groaned, "Yeah, right."

"No, I mean it, you're growing into—"

He lifted his hand to stop me. "So, you gonna take me?"

Before I could answer, Warren struggled out of the hammock. "Let your father finish up, I'll take you."

And so they left, my brother and my son, the two of them moving down the brick walkway through a dusky light, one wide and flabby, the other razor thin and erect, cutting through the air like a blade.

When they were gone I finished the cleaning, carefully scrubbed the grill's charred ironwork, then walked inside the house. Meredith had left a book on the table, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. I picked it up, brought it over to my chair, and switched on the gooseneck lamp. Then I opened the book, looked up the poem she'd talked about at dinner, found it hard to follow, but interesting enough, especially the mournful sentiment at the end, that, according to the poet, "After the first death, there is no other."

I was snoozing in my chair when the phone rang a few hours later.

It was Keith. "You don't have to pick me up," he said. "I'm gonna stay out for a while. Maybe hang out with some people."

I'd never known Keith simply to seek out other people, but given his troubling solitariness, the news that he might have such an urge struck me as an encouraging sign of normality.