Page 53 of Her Brother's Keeper

I lay with her until after she fell asleep, then I took her phone and my phone downstairs with me so when the alarms went off in the morning, they wouldn’t wake her. I packed my table and the shit that went with it out to my cage, before heading back inside. I wanted to go back upstairs, lay down with her and hold her, protect her while she slept, but Sage was pretty much an unknown quantity on whether he would flip a bitch or rat us out. The kid had broken trust with me, and that wasn’t shit that was easy to come by.

He’d be hard pressed to earn it back. It was one of those tough life lessons he was about to go through. I’d been his friend up to this point, but it was pretty clear friendship wasn’t as needed as some structure and discipline. I could provide that too, for a while and see which he preferred. I settled down on the couch, in the dark, and slept uneasily. It was going to be a long night and I didn’t do well in unfamiliar places. It just wasn’t my thing. It was a good thing I would do anything for Maren. It was a real good thing.

***

“Where’s Maren?” Sage asked, poking his head outside his bedroom door.

“Asleep.”And not going to deal with whatever petty bullshit you cook up today,I thought to myself. Out loud I said, “Get dressed. I’m taking you to school. You’re taking the bus home and I meanstraighthome. Do I make myself clear?”

He blinked up at me owlishly and cocked his head to the side.Just try it,I thought. I waited for which way he’d go. Mean or sulking comment or sullen silence, any of which were likely to be punctuated by the bedroom door being slammed in my face. That wasn’t about to go well for him either.

“The only reason you pretended to be friends with me is because you want to fuck my sister, huh?” he asked and went to slam the door. My hand stopped it, flat against the wood with a hard shove that bowled the kid on his ass in the middle of the hardwood of his bedroom floor. I stepped into the room and shut the door behind me. I didn’t want to wake Maren, and Sage and I needed to have a little chat.

“It’s time for you to grow the fuck up, Sage. Your sister had to, way before her time, to take care of your whiny, sorry ass. Now it’s your turn to give back a little. She’s trying way too hard for you to turn around and turn into a disrespectful little shit.”

He stood up and took a swing at me and I caught it, hooking my arm at his elbow, sidestepping his follow through. His fist whizzed through the empty air and I had his arms hung up behind his back. He struggled and I put some torsion into my hold until he yelped and backed off in his struggles. I pushed him away from me and he flopped onto his bed.

“That’s the first and last time you take a swing at me. Get dressed and get your ass down to my cage. I’m taking you to school and if you eventhinkabout waking up your sister, you’re going to regret it. Playtime is over, Boy. Your lessons on what it is to be the man of the house begin now.”

I punctuated my harsh words with the occasional stabs of my finger at him in the air. He was wide-eyed with disbelief and I couldn’t say that I gave much of a fuck. Maren deserved so much better than anything he’d been dishing out and it was clear the kind and patient approach that was so uniquely his sister’s, wasn’t working. It was my turn, and I was giving him a bit of a taste of how I was raised to make a point.

I left him wide eyed and staring at me and opened up the bedroom door telling him, “You’ve got five minutes. Move it or lose it.”

I waited downstairs and I timed him, he had two minutes, thirty-seven seconds on the clock when he came thundering down the staircase. I raised a hand, palm out to stop him.

“You wake up your sister, I’m whooping your ass.”

He froze, “You can’t say that to me!” he said, indignantly.

“Who’s going to stop me?” I demanded and he blustered a second and fell silent.

“No, go on, think about it… I want you to really think about the position you’ve put yourself in, Sage.” I crossed my arms over my chest, the leather of my jacket and cut creaking while I watched the cogs and wheels whir and click behind his brown eyes. He needed a haircut, the dark strands, just like his sister’s, getting into his eyes.

“Why are you being so mean to me?” he asked and sounded fragile, vulnerable.

“Could ask you the same thing, kid.”

More contemplative silence.

“I thought you really liked me, but it was just my sister the whole time.”

“Did I ever say that?” he looked at me sharply. “Come on, let’s go. If we move it, we have time for breakfast.”

He slung his backpack higher on his shoulder and I took it off him, the navy blue canvas had seen better days, and I made a mental note to either mend it or to get him a new one. He pulled on his coat, hat, and scarf, turning to take back his bag.

“You’ve got two choices, Sage,” I said to him. “You can either work with us, do what you’re told, and stop giving your sister a hard time. Do that, and we can go back to the older, nicer version of me; or,” and I rested my hand on his shoulder, “you can keep doing what you’re doing, going behind Maren’s back, making shit up and making sneaky phone calls and end up in a place where you get worse than the new, angrier me.”

“Worse?” he echoed swallowing hard.

“I just stopped you from hitting me; where I come from, I would have had my ass whooped with a belt until I bled. Broken bones? They weren’t out of the question either.”

“They can’t do that!” he said astonished. I put my hand on his shoulder.

“Lesson one, just because they can’t don't mean they won’t. They did, and they knew just what to say and how to say it to get right off the hook, which brings me to lesson two: You are never as smart as you think you are. There is always someone smarter.”

Sage looked thoughtful and then looked up at me, “You aren’t making this up?”

“Lesson three, a man has no honor if he’s a fucking liar. I’m not making it up, I have the scars to prove it. Look at me when I tell you this.” His eyes snapped back up to mine. “I love your sister the way she ought to be loved, and I love you like a little brother I never had. You have it in you to be a great kid, but the fighting at school, the not listening to adults, the attempts to get other kids to act out and misbehave… like I said, playtime is over, Kid. Time to grow up some and face your demons. I’m right here if you ever want to talk about it – Iamyour friend. Always have been, always will be. There’s nothing pretend about that. I just happen to love your sister, too.”

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