Miller's Valley by Anna Quindlen Page B

first aid kit and iodine, but my father sent me back to the house and I called for an ambulance. I called the hospital, too, and told my mother we were coming in. “I’m going down to emergency,” she said in her nurse’s voice, calm and cool, which was noticeable because I was crying and my nose was running and I was having a hard time catching my breath.
    “He can’t have lived through all that in Vietnam and then die drunk on a damn tractor,” I sobbed.
    “Take a deep breath, honey,” said my mother, and I cried even harder because my mother only called me honey when things were really bad. Then I heard the sirens and got off the phone.
    “Mary Margaret, what’s going on?” my aunt Ruth called from her living room window, and I realized it was getting light and that I was going to miss school.
    “Tommy,” I called back, and ran onto the road.

W hen my brother had finally come home for good, people said he was a changed man. That wasn’t true. He looked a little like Tommy Miller, and sometimes he even talked a little like Tommy Miller. But the real Tommy Miller was gone. I don’t know where he left him, but that guy didn’t live in Miller’s Valley anymore. One day a car had dropped him opposite the barn just as I was getting home from school. I wrapped my arms around his neck, but it was like hugging a mannequin. He peeled me off as soon as was decent, or maybe sooner.
    “Who was that?” I said as the sound of the car’s spitting muffler receded. “Damned if I know,” said Tom, picking up the military-issue duffel at his feet.
    We weren’t even sure where he’d been. He’d been gone more than three years, but Eddie was certain he hadn’t been in the service all that time. It was funny, Tom had changed so much but Eddie hadn’t changed much at all, still serious and a little anxious. He was working as an engineer at a big real estate development company, had bought a nice little house just outside Philadelphia. He’d gotten married a couple of years after college; Tom was supposed to get leave to be his best man but just never showed up. I was a bridesmaid; my dress was purple and a little big on me, and they did my hair teased and lacquered into some kind of updo. As soon as we got home I tore it all down and my mother changed into slacks and a summer shirt. It was like we had been visitors in Eddie’s life, and we were glad to be back sleeping in our own beds.
    “They seem like nice people,” my father kept saying about Debbie’s parents.
    I guess you could say that it was the other way around with Tom after he got back, that he turned into a visitor in our lives. He got himself a place near town and we didn’t see him a whole lot, and when he came to dinner or stopped by to use the washing machine we had nothing to talk about. “What have you been doing?” I’d say, and he’d say “Not much,” and where do you go after that? He even scared me a little. He’d grown a big mustache and his hair was even longer now, and everything about him had coarsened, his skin, his body, his language, his eyes. The light in his eyes was gone, and so was the grin. That broke my mother’s heart, I think. The fact that he was living in a falling-down trailer on the other side of the valley and yet always had enough money hardened my father’s. I was glad we lived so far from anyone else so no one could hear him and my father yelling at one another after they’d had a couple of beers, or more than a couple. My father might drink six beers during the course of an evening and just get quieter and quieter, until finally he’d say, “It’s the sandman for me.” But Tommy was one of those drunks who went through all the stages: sociable, silent, sulky, mean, nasty, violent. He tuned my father up, although he’d probably say it was the other way around.
    One evening after Tommy had been back a few months Callie asked me to pick her up at work because her car was in the shop. She’d been a good