Nothing Gold Can Stay by Ron Rash Page A

she’d let Baroque and Marlboro come up from Florida in the first place. She’d wanted to help her brothers improve themselves, and Denton couldn’t blame her for that. After all, hard as it was to believe, they were her brothers. She was even trying to get them, or at least Baroque, interested in medicine. Baroque was sort of smart, Susie claimed, and if Baroque got a job as a med tech maybe Marlboro could be an orderly or something. She’d taken them to the clinic with her for a day, and now she had them watching the medical shows. It might inspire them, she claimed, though Denton was of a mind that a good kick in their lardy asses would inspire them more.
    Susie watched the medical shows as much as she could. She might need to know this sometime, she always said when Denton complained. He understood it could be helpful to someone in the medical field, but Susie didn’t watch the shows about a heart transplant or a knee operation or a woman having a baby. Susie watched shows with names like Medical Mysteries or I Survived, shows about hundred-pound tumors or people who’d lost all their toes to frostbite or who internally combusted, and it all gave Denton the willies. He would go in the back room and watch the fourteen-inch TV on the bureau, catch the news on CNN and then maybe one of the business shows, or get on the computer, where he’d been doing the bear research. Anything was better than the medical shows. The worst thing to Denton was how they always ended. There’d be upbeat music and the announcer would talk about miracles, and the person who’d had the hundred-pound tumor or the man whose leg had been snapped off by a shark always acted like it was a good thing this had happened. Now Susie had Baroque and Marlboro watching them every night, probably even a few about bear attacks.
    They did at least watch them. Whenever Denton ventured into the front room, their eyes were always on the screen. They weren’t talking and seemed to be paying attention. Of course Baroque and Marlboro never did talk a lot anyway, not to Denton, or even much to Susie. They just sat next to each other, in the exact same posture, like twins. Part of that was surely their being less than a year apart in age, and also because Baroque and Marlboro did look like twins, at least in the face and especially their eyes, which changed when they shifted them in a different direction—less green to more brown or vice versa. It reminded Denton of his twelfth-grade biology project. The teacher had given every student in the class a jar of fruit flies, and after a while the fruit flies’ eyes were supposed to change, and everybody else’s fruit flies had changed eye color except Denton’s. His just crawled around on the glass for an hour and then died. He got a D- on a major nine-week project, which was totally unfair. Denton hadn’t picked out the flies or put them in the jar. He hadn’t asked for them. They were just there on his desk one morning. He got no college-scholarship offers like Susie, and instead had to work his way through. The damn fruit flies had made sure of that.
    Susie saw Baroque and Marlboro’s interest in the medical shows as a step forward. Still, neither of them had actually left the house to apply for a med tech program or orderly job, and though Susie hadn’t actually said it, Denton suspected even she was tired of her brothers being around. It had pretty much shut down their sex life, because their house was a fine house but a small one. Baroque was in the spare room with just three inches of drywall between him and their bedroom. Marlboro was on the couch, and if Denton and Susie could hear the springs squeak whenever Baroque or Marlboro turned over, then they sure as hell could hear what he and Susie were up to. After the nightmare sex of their first marriages, there had been issues to work out, which they had. Until the brothers-in-law showed up, Susie tended to moan some and rock the bed a good bit, but