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You have a son who is eight years old. He smiles like his mother, wide and genuine and easy, and you're grateful that you have somehow managed to quarantine your sadness from him. He makes you happy, and the impossible fact that your brother didn't get to see your happiness, to meet him, to see how cool he is, to be his cool uncle, if there was some version of the world where you had a son and a brother both, that lanceolet unfairness has become familiar and bearable, most of the time.
When your son turned eight you gave him a bike. He stays week on week off with you, and you live near his mother, so that the change is fairly seamless. His mother recently started seeing a man who has two boys, older than your son. They go to the same school. If it sticks, your son will be a little brother, sort of. He's asked before why he doesn't have a little brother or sister. You and his mother had split by then. It wasn't something you could give him. You said, it's okay to not have a brother or a sister, because then all your friends are like your brothers and sisters. He's very close with a boy who lives down the end of the street, another only child, and you watch them play soldiers and kick balls and climb trees and you feel so much that it changes the shape of your chest, the way your skin sits over your bones. When he is not with you, you live alone.
You gave your son a big boy's bike, and you helped him learn his balance, and then one Wednesday you were eating breakfast together in the kitchenette of your small house and the sun was shining bright but kind through the curtains, one of the last mild days of fall, and you leaned in and said with a secret voice why don't we skip school today huh? Let's ride down to the river. And his eyes widened and he swallowed his Cheerios in a great gulp because he didn't know that was a thing that could even happen.
You texted the school and did the dishes and he fidgeted at the table and seemed kind of nervous, worried his teacher might be worried about him. He is a good kid, and his days are stable and predictable. He has known the same neighbourhood all his life; the same people. You told him it would be fine and sent him to watch his shows with the cat curled on his lap, while you made PB&J the way he liked it, which was the way you liked it, which was the way your brother used to make it. You packed a bag with lunch and snacks and a book and you made him go find his water bottle and you showed him how to check his tyre pressure and his brakes and you locked the house and left. It was a quiet street you lived on, and you rode side by side. He looked up at you and smiled under his helmet, and his bike was steady.
It was uphill and then downhill, long and easy, to the river. Small drifts of leaves that your son crunched through, weaving alarmingly across the street as he spotted them, and then he settled in to the ride. The houses got bigger and further apart. The oaks taller, older. He told you that back there was where someone from school lived, who wasn't his friend, who someone said had done something to someone else and made that person cry, but you were passing a gas station and making a mental note about buying him an ice-cream on the way back, and you missed most of the details. You said it wasn't nice to make people cry, and he agreed, already talking about the next thing.
On the slope down to the river he drew ahead, and you watched him and thought about being eight years old and free, at the dog end of summer, on a bike next to your brother, looking up at him as he looked ahead and told you where you were both going that day, to the dump or past the deer farm or to the woods or told you that he didn't know, that he was gonna close his eyes and wait for you to tell him left or right or straight, and he would always let you steer him into a mailbox and curse you out while you laughed. Your brother as a boy, and you as a boy, there were times that were so golden and unhaunted by the before and after that you would almost believe they never existed except that you remember them, you remember his face and his voice and the sun on your back and you remember the trust you had in him to make the world seem vast and full.
At the river you snacked, and then you poked around, and then you found some good rocks to sit and eat lunch on in the sun while the river gurgled underneath you. It smelled like pine. There were birds in the trees. Your son said, all this water comes from the mountains, and you said yeah, most of it, and you talked about rivers for a while. He lay on his stomach, watching over the edge for fish. His hair brushed the back of his neck, hanging forward. His feet were bare and already dirty.
You stayed for another hour, and he tested the water with his toes and discovered it too cold, and instead dug up sticks, and bugs, and worms. He asked you to watch him while he hung from a tree branch and swung his legs, and you told him it was a ten from the Russian judge. He laughed although he didn't get the joke, and dropped, and landed on all fours. You had a book in your lap, but mostly you were thinking about the old days, and about how you forgot to defrost anything for dinner, and how tired his legs would be tonight, and how you'd probably have to pull him up that last hill, and you closed your book and said come on Dean, and he looked up from where he was trying to hunt a cricket down in the grass. Time to go home.