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Steve showed up on Becca’s doorstep a month after the invasion in New York, larger than life and trying to hide it. He rolled his shoulders inward and blinked all tragic and doe-eyed through thick lashes as if sheer force of denial could render him a foot shorter and a hundred fifty pounds worth of muscle lighter. Becca just clicked her tongue and stepped to the side.
“Took you long enough, you lunkhead,” she said. “Now quit letting the flies in, I got chores for you.”
Steve slunk in like a teenaged boy after curfew and Becca bustled her creaky old bones into the kitchen, where she began taking out ingredients and parchment paper and her Kitchen Aid. Steve wandered in after her, and in her peripheral vision she saw him take an unnatural interest in her wallpaper.
“How long you lived here?” he asked, stuck on a 1977 baby picture of her first grandson.
“What year is it?” Becca said. She was treated to Steve’s wide-eyed astonishment, which lasted as long as it took for Becca to break and snicker. Steve’s eyelids drooped and his mouth thinned out — his long-suffering disappointment, trademark Steve Rogers. And easy as that, there he was: the boy she remembered.
“You think you’re funny, Beck, but you know it ain’t right, teasin’ your elders.”
She flicked him with a dishrag and turned back to measuring out her dry ingredients and dumping them in her mixing bowl.
“Forty-eight years,” she said. “Moved here in ’64 for Ellery’s job. What brings you to the boonies, Steve?”
“Hardly the boonies, I think,” Steve said. He did a stretch beside her that damn near threatened to put her eye out with the bulging muscles, and if it were anyone else, she’d roll her eyes at the posturing. But it was Steve, and he probably had no idea he was doing it at all.
“Ithaca’s the boonies when you’re a Brooklyn girl,” Becca said. “Especially back then.”
“Don’t knock it,” Steve said. “Nabokov wrote Lolita here.”
“Because there was damn well nothing else to do, I’m telling you.”
Becca shoved herself between Steve and the refrigerator to get at the eggs and buttermilk. She handed him a tangerine.
“Zest that,” she said, “and then mix it with the egg and buttermilk.”
“What are we making?”
“You’re no kinda Irishman if you don’t already know, Steve.”
“That’s why they call me Captain America.”
Becca snorted and worked around his bulk.
“We mighta had some substitutions back then,” she conceded. “Maybe there wasn’t much orange zest and raisins to go around, but you get the gist.” Becca turned her mixer on its lowest setting and began to add the butter slowly, one chunk at a time. Steve was crowding her, even from a foot away. That was the result of getting jacked full of mystery sauce and shipped off to the army to be cannon fodder along with her fool brother, she guessed. She shrank away from him and tucked her chin into her chest.
“Becca.”
“You know you’re in the way all the time now? Shift your buns, Frankenstein.”
“Becca, look at me.”
“I’m busy, Steve.”
“Becca.”
“Don’t.”
Steve fell silent. Becca added more butter to the mixer. The dough wasn’t dough yet, but the butter was combining nicely, and soon it would be the proper sandy mixture.
“There’s some stuff I want you to take up to the attic,” she said when the drone of the mixer got too heavy in her ears. “And then I want you to move the fridge and the sofas so I can clean behind them, and then you can do some weeding for me. But we can’t do none of it till you mix the damn buttermilk up.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Steve said. “You, uh. You don’t have any help? Day to day?”
“Subtle, Steve.”
“Subtle’s not really my strong point.”
“You don’t gotta tell me,” Becca said. “Don’t forget I knew you, five foot nothin’ with your lip split. You can’t fool me, even lookin’ like—” She waved a gnarled hand vaguely between them. “—whatever that is.”
“I know it,” Steve said softly. He set his little bowl on the counter beside her and poked halfheartedly at the mixture inside with a fork. Becca berated herself for imagining he would be better at this than he ever was a lifetime ago, for imagining, even for a moment, that he was like her grandsons, these twenty-first century boys unafraid of putting on aprons. She sighed and snatched the bowl away to whip the buttermilk good.
“Ellery died ten years back,” she said. “In his sleep’n all. My kids don’t live around here anymore but they call me every day like big damn nuisances, and I got a neighbor to come in and have tea with me every afternoon. I ain’t helpless.”
“You could come live with me,” Steve blurted. Becca felt herself smile, because duty and honor and misplaced guilt? That was Steve Rogers all over. “Back in Brooklyn. It would be what he— I got the money, and the space. I can take care of you, Beck. I want to.”
“I’m fine here, boyo. Lived here damn near fifty years.”
“But you just said—”
“You don’t owe me nothin’, Steve.”
“Yes I—”
“No. You got it in your head that you owe Bucky, and I can be his stand-in now that you gotta find a way to be in a place he ain’t. I’m ninety-two years old and I won’t play that game with you, Steve. My ghosts are six feet under where they belong.”
Becca poured the contents of the little bowl into the mixer and watched the dough go wet and sloshy. Steve shifted like tectonic plates beside her. She shook a sprinkling of flour out onto her counter and pushed the raisins into it to coat them.
“Mine aren’t,” he whispered, and Becca’s hand stilled on the raisins. “I’m barely out of the ice. Six months in this brave new world, some internet and books and what? I’m supposed to forget? I lost everyone, Becca. Everyone and everything and I can still feel him on my fingertips, I can still hear him—”
Becca elbowed him away from her and dumped the raisins into the mixer. She turned it on high and the resulting din whited out the sound of her own clattering heart.
“And you won’t even look at me,” Steve said, voice raised. “I shouldn’a come here. I’ll do your chores and get outta your hair.”
“You shoulda come here six months ago,” Becca snapped, pushing her hands through the flour on the counter. “You shoulda come home, been with your family instead of — whatever the hell you were doing. You completed your service, Steve. You gave your life for this country and what, they want more? Lay your goddamned head down. You’ve earned it.”
“I couldn’t,” Steve said. “It took everything in me to ring your doorbell today.”
Becca turned off the mixer, scraped the dough from the sides of the mixing bowl with a spatula, and began to haul it all together in a sticky ball. “You’re a damn fool.”
“Beck—”
“You need to come in from the cold, you come to the Barneses. You know that damn well, Steve Rogers. Now get over here and knead this soda bread for an old lady and hush up.”
With that, Becca plopped the ball of dough onto the flour-dusted counter, wiped her hands on the rag, and crossed her arms over her chest as she fixed Steve with her best grandkid-wrangling glare. He slouched over to her, eyes downcast and properly chastised.
“I don’t remember how,” he said quietly.
“Just push it out with the heels of your hands,” Becca said. “Fold and start over. Fold and start over.”
She let herself look at him then, really look. It was one thing to see him on film, playacting on styrofoam sets, but it was another to see the effects of his science cocktail up close and personal. He was so young, but he had no idea. He was young enough to believe reaching his mid-twenties made him a grown up, the kind of young that felt old until you really knew what age felt like, settling into your bones. His jaw was all wrong, sturdy and square, but the spray of freckles was just the same, the lock of hair falling over his forehead, the way his nose crooked just so, courtesy of Jack McMurtry, 1933. Becca’s heart turned heavy as she reached up to push the hair from his eyes. He startled and met her gaze. In the blue she found a new and fathomless sadness, familiar and howling. When it was too much, they both looked down at the dough he was kneading.
“You just keep at it,” she said. “You’ll know when it’s ready.”
—
“What—” was all she could get out.
“Don’t move,” he said, voice gravelly. “I’m gonna get help.”
Becca blinked and blinked. She knew that voice. She knew the furrow in that brow.
“I’ve finally gone nuts,” she gasped. “Take me, Lord.”
“Shh,” the man said. “Save your breath.”
Words he’d said a million times, to a different failure of a body, in a different lifetime.
“Buck—”
He reached for something in his pocket, and Becca closed her eyes. She’d stopped believing in God and angels and the afterlife a long time ago, but if she was wrong, she could take it. If being wrong meant seeing her brother again, she’d be happy to eat crow every day for the rest of eternity.
“Missed you,” she said between shallow breaths. “So damn much.”
“Hold on, Beck.”
He was speaking again, in low urgent tones to someone other than Becca.
“Always had an overactive imagination,” Becca said. “Metal arm. Hippie hair. Ha.”
“Were you always this contrary?” the man said. “I told you to save your breath.”
“You can’t tell me nothin’, Bucky Barnes.”
“God,” he said. “God.” And he bent over her, put his nose in what was left of her hair, used that metal hand to skim gently over the unbruised side of her body. “I missed you, too.”
“I’m glad it’s you, taking me on home.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“I thought I’d never see you again.”
“Now we got all the time in the world, you hear me? Just save. Your. Breath."
Distantly, Becca could hear the wail of sirens getting closer. Becca closed her mouth, just to humor her favorite ghost.
—
“When you’re as old as I am, bruised might as well be broken,” Becca said, scowling. She could barely move as it was. Bucky, tucked up in the corner of her room, was silent. She couldn’t quite be sure he was there at all. Once her lungs had started working properly again, she’d shaken the delirium, but the specter of her brother still haunted the periphery of her vision, and she didn’t know what to think.
“You’d be frying a whole other kettle of fish if anything were broken, ma’am,” the doctor said. He nodded at the corner, where Bucky was perched on a chair still as death. “You’ve got a fine grandson there, helping you out.”
“That’s my brother,” Becca said, “and he’s dead.”
She realized she made a tactical error as soon as she said it, and the doctor was suddenly very interested in her pupils, and Bucky was suddenly very interested in how he could rub his face in his hand. Even if she’d lost her marbles, there was no way she was going into an old folks’ home to be babied and ignored.
“Joking,” Becca said. “Ha ha, me and my grandson havin’ a laugh, you know how it is.”
“I’m the spit of her brother, doc,” Bucky piped up. “Call it, um, a recurring gag.”
The doctor fixed a narrow-eyed look at the ghost in the corner, and Becca could imagine the look on his face even without turning around to see: Bucky’s raised eyebrows, his most innocent expression, the one that worked on every girl in Brooklyn Heights that wasn’t their mother. Becca began to laugh.
“Get it?” she said. “It’s funny because he’s dead.”
“Come on, Grandma, leave the poor doctor alone,” Bucky said, patting her on the shoulder. Then, to the doctor, “She’s kooky, but we love her.”
“If you need help talking to her about elder care—”
“That’s not necessary,” Bucky said, standing. The doctor swallowed, jaw clenching, and Bucky shifted. “Thanks.” His tone went soft. “I’ve got this handled.”
“Well. You’re free to take her home. And if you need any assistance, please, call this number.” The doctor handed Bucky a business card.
“Thanks,” Bucky said again, and the doctor left. Bucky came up sure and steady in Becca’s line of sight, never letting her break eye contact. He held up the business card and made her watch as he threw it in the waste paper basket.
“I reckon you’re as sane as you ever were,” Bucky said. “Like a rabid raccoon.”
“How is this possible?” Becca said.
Bucky shrugged, but it wasn’t the loose-limbed, devil-may-care gesture it might once have been. It was tense, controlled, and self-conscious in a way that spoke to its calculation. It was no way to convince Becca that this phantom was her brother, and yet it was the best proof she’d seen so far. No one went to war and came home the same. And, if she was still playing with a full deck, she figured this version of her brother had seen a lot more war than just the one.
“How is Steve possible?” Bucky said. “You seem to believe that easy as pie.”
“You seen Steve?”
Bucky sighed and dropped back into his chair, propping his chin in his hands.
“Yeah, I seen Steve,” he said. “Poor mook led me right to you, last time he visited.”
That was two weeks ago. Steve had been on edge, but he wouldn’t tell her why, and he left after only an hour.
“You cased the joint for two whole weeks?”
Bucky’s face split into a grin. It looked hard-won, and Becca felt something a lot like triumph rise up through the haze of pain radiating from her battered bones.
“Didn’t know how to announce myself.”
“Well you damn near killed me off, busting in like that. Almost had a heart attack, hand to God.”
“You’re too stubborn to die, Beck, you know that.”
“You boys,” Becca said, “the both of you, moping around coddling your little feelings like the rest of us ain’t got none. You deserve each other.”
She’d meant it as another joke, but it came out harsher than she’d intended. Truer. The lingering smile on Bucky’s face evaporated. He planted his feet on the floor and leaned forward, elbows balanced on his knees. He pressed his forehead into the edge of her mattress, and carefully, carefully, she placed one hand in the greasy tangle of his hair.
“Buck?” she said. “You just see Steve, or did you talk to him?”
“I can’t,” he said, muffled. “You don’t know what I done, Beck. You got no idea.”
“Ah, hell.”
“I got no right—”
“Now you listen to me, James Barnes.” Becca tugged on his hair so he’d look at her, but she figured he could take it. His eyes were wide and bloodshot. “Steve Rogers ain’t no saint, and he ain’t no fool. You and I both no there’s nothing you could do to keep that boy from forgiving whatever you think your sins are.”
“I don’t deserve it,” Bucky whispered.
Becca let out a bitter bark of a laugh. She let his hair go and allowed herself to slump into the pillows.
“The universe doesn’t much deal in deserving, Buck,” she said. “Now listen good, because I’m old and I know better than you: you grab at happiness. You take it and run. Because maybe you think you don’t deserve it, but there’s no question that the big lug in the stars and stripes does.”
Bucky looked pale and gaunt, the way the shell-shocked soldiers used to back when Becca’s loss was fresh and she couldn’t bear to look at them even when she was meant to be treating them. He looked at her like a child looks at his mother when all the world is wrong. She smoothed down his unkempt hair and was reminded, then, of her own sons, and the hair she’d badgered them into cutting, forty or more years ago now. She had lived so much more than Bucky had. She had been so much richer.
“Steve and me,” Bucky said haltingly, “we can’t be like we were.” It was as close to an admission of what she’d always known they were to each other as she had ever heard. It was more than she’d thought she’d ever hear.
“The world is different now,” Becca said after a moment. “Times have changed.”
“So have I,” Bucky said. “So has he. We don’t fit.”
“You ain’t even tried.”
“I don’t need to. I’m no good, Beck.”
Becca sighed and pushed him away. She struggled to swing her legs over one side of the bed. He was up and trying to help her in a heartbeat, but she waved him and the hospital-issue walker he wielded away.
“I got no time for damn fools,” she said. “Take me home and go away.”
“Beck—”
“Nope!”
“I can help out while you’re out of commission.”
“You mean you can sulk in every corner of my house? No thanks, downer.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I’m gonna go home and watch Wheel of Fortune. And you know what else I’m gonna do? I’m gonna call Steve and tell him you were mean to me.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I would.”
“He’ll know you’re lying.”
“No he won’t, he likes to believe the best of people.”
“He knows I wouldn’t!”
Becca raised an eyebrow at him and he scowled, arms crossing over his chest.
“Can’t say as I understand how two men bumble along together, being thick as two planks like the whole lot of you are,” she said. “It’s a goddamn miracle any of you get to the altar at all, much less with each other. Hopeless.”
She pushed Bucky aside to get to the walker on her own power, and then she was standing tall and leaving her room, ignoring the ghost trailing along after her.
—
“You jackasses,” she said as she let them in. “Took you long enough. I got chores.”
End