Photo by Delaney Van on Unsplash
I didn’t know Mr. Clancy and have no idea whether he earned a Silver Star in some war, but that’s what he called his little grocery store on Main Street in town: Clancy’s Silver Star.
My brother’s girlfriend worked there in 1978, when Bobby was eighteen and ready to join the Army. I always thought I’d work there, too, but instead started out washing dishes at Denny’s when I was sixteen. When I graduated from high school I also graduated to full-time at the restaurant, bringing home leftovers to my pregnant wife, too busy to look back.
But now I do, and the summer before Bobby became old enough to work stays with me. Bobby had nothing better to do that summer than remind me of the control he yielded over my meager existence. He stood tall and wide, a football player with blonde curls he sometimes grew out to an afro to look even more intimidating. I was short with jet black hair that fell into my eyes all the time, especially during those hot, muggy Syracuse summers.
We lived smack dab in the middle of New York State near places like Green Lakes State Park, where we’d run down the steepest part of Tulip Hill, colliding into each other the whole way. Bobby confided that our dad had shown that path to him and run down it with him when Bobby was nine, a few months before our dad got sick. I don’t remember our dad, but at least he showed Bobby a few fun things, like running down Tulip Hill. The best part about that run was going back to the beach all hot and dirty to hurl ourselves off the diving boards near the snack shack into the welcome shock of lake’s cold water.
But a trip to Green Lakes was a huge big deal because it cost money to get in. Usually we swam at Kennedy Pool across town with our red wristbands proof that we were town residents. Girls had to wear bathing caps that snapped tight and made their foreheads wrinkle and pucker like old grapefruits, but Bobby and I only needed a bathing suit, a wristband, and maybe a towel to enjoy Kennedy Pool. And someone to drive us across town.
Mom worked all day in some office, leaving super early each morning. I’d sometimes hear her in the kitchen and get up to have a bowl of cereal while she got ready for work, locking the front door behind her and watching her drive off in her noisy, rusted Chevy through the narrow window by the door. In the winter after a heavy snow that routine would include Bobby, who’d always throw a pillow toward the door to his room where I’d stand, yelling at him that we needed to shovel so Mom could get out the driveway. He’d always do what he was told, never talking back to Mom, his frustration over having to perform such a dreaded chore taken out on me, instead, who suffered the brunt when I failed to dodge thrown pillows or even see my brother direct a laser-aimed snowball at me while I was shoveling, trying to keep up. Every time I got hit by one of those snowballs, which hurt like hell, all I wanted was to be big enough to tackle my brother face first into a snowbank.
The summer Bobby was fifteen was the second summer Mom put him officially in charge while she worked what seemed like a long eight hours every day. By the time she got home each evening she was not much in the mood to chat or fix dinner, so Bobby and I would make sandwiches for her and us before she arrived. I got pretty good at making grilled cheese, but Bobby usually barked it was too hot to cook and I was going to burn myself and why was I such a doofus anyway. Later I realized Bobby was just practicing to be a drill sergeant, which in fact he would one day become.
He was right about the summer being a scorcher, though. I hung out near the fan in the living room most of the time, ooohing and aaaahing to hear my voice vibrate off its spinning blades. Whenever the fan stopped suddenly, I knew Bobby had pulled the plug again and was about to list chores I suddenly needed to do.
When Bobby did that one Thursday before lunch, I stared up at his big leering grin, and at the cord dangling in his hand like a stalk from one of Mom’s dying plants out front, and decided it was time to go. I was still sweaty from having taken a bag of trash out to the trash can outside the house, where it felt like it was already a hundred degrees, and standing there pounding on the side door for what felt like forever because my stupid brother had locked it on me. And that had been after I’d cleaned the kitchen while he supervised and yelled at me about every little thing I was doing wrong. Before Bobby could tell me what else to do, I got up and put on my beat-up Converse sneakers.
“Where do you think you’re going, Joey?” Bobby bellowed.
I left without a word, the front screen door banging closed behind me, but Bobby was at the door in a second. “I asked you a question, doofus.”
I stepped off the front porch. “Clancy’s,” I answered, surprising myself.
“For what?” Bobby’s voice got a little higher here as I forced my feet to keep moving across our patchy, dried-out front yard. The screen door screeched open and shut.
“You don’t have any money, nimnod,” my brother reminded me.
His point taken, I glanced down the street, hoping to see someone playing catch or something, but didn’t spot anyone.
“I’ll have to go with you,” Bobby said, still on the porch. “I can’t let anything happen to Mama’s precious baby boy.”
I stopped. “Mom pays you to baby sit me, not boss me around.”
“Exactly,” Bobby countered, arms crossed. “BABY sit you. Because you’re a BABY.”
“I’m almost ten,” I shot back, wishing I were at least tall enough to look my brother in the eye. “And I’m old enough to go to the store by myself. Mom sends me all the time, to get stuff.”
“Does not,” Bobby huffed.
“Does, too.”
“Does not! She sends ME to the store because she knows I won’t DROP anything.”
One day I’d pedaled away from Clancy’s with a glass bottle of cooking oil for Mom and somehow the bottle slipped and shattered in the street. Bobby loved to remind me of that every chance he got. This time, though, his reminder gave me an idea. I went to the side of the house to retrieve my bike, a hand-me-down with a chain that fell off all the time and a banana seat that usually came loose. I’d learned to tighten the seat with a wrench; the chain I just had to live with.
I hopped on my bike and swooped down our driveway before Bobby realized he ought to run to get his own bike, which was out back. I knew he would catch up to me fast once he got going, but I turned onto Helen Street anyway, expecting to hear him holler up close any minute. Then I turned away from town onto Millen Drive, which had a nifty little hill that added to my momentum, and I was gone.
But not for long. After a right on Catherine Street, a jolt traveled from the scuffed bottoms of my sneakers through my shins all the way to my shoulders and jaw as I lurched to a stop. The bike’s chain had fallen off. I got off and crouched to fix it, my hands soon cramped and filthy but the job soon done, and realized not only that I was sweating buckets but that I was too hungry to go anywhere but home. So I turned around, hopped back on, and pedaled carefully back to our street, hoping and hoping I wouldn’t see Bobby coming from the other way. I figured he’d be halfway to Clancy’s by now, and if I was quick I could grab something to eat and fill up the ancient, flying saucer-shaped Boy Scout canteen in Bobby’s room that smelled of long-ago hikes the likes of which I’d never been on. Maybe I could even sneak a couple dollars out of Bobby’s wallet before he got back.
As soon as I hit our driveway I ditched my bike and ran inside, sweat dripping off me as I made a bee-line for the kitchen. I washed quick, barely rubbing away the grease from the stupid bike chain, then stuffed some deli ham into my mouth, shoved some Pringles into a sandwich bag, and ran to my brother’s room to retrieve the canteen. Then I returned to the kitchen sink and began to fill it―until I died a thousand deaths from a million tiny heart attacks when I heard through all the open windows of the house Bobby’s bike race into the front yard.
Every kid knows the sound of an angry older sibling riding a jangling bike into a yard. There was no way this arrival was that of a buddy from down the street. It was a violent arrival, and by the time it had been followed by the slam of the front screen door I was already out of the kitchen with whatever water had spilled into the canteen, its metal top still dangling from the chain that kept it attached, the bag of Pringles a crushed mass in my clenched hand.
I was out the back door within seconds, but Bobby plowed through the kitchen and right out behind me. By the time he caught hold of me his face was redder than one of the ripe tomatoes Mom was growing in her tiny garden.
“Glad you got a little lunch, Joey, ’cause you won’t have any teeth left by the time I’m through with you,” Bobby growled.
Little brothers know there’s really nothing to fear when a big brother threatens, because the fact remains that big brothers get in trouble for actually beating the living daylights out of their younger siblings. Still, I was terrified of what I might suffer if Bobby were to forget that fact. So I went into possum mode and hung there by the collar of my t-shirt while Bobby shook me as though I were an old rug that needed the dust pounded out of it.
Then he dropped me. “But I’m too hot and hungry to deal with you right now,” he grumbled. “So….”
That pause was worse than anything Bobby could dish out. I sat there, a heap of a boy in the shadow of his tormenter, all the possible brotherly punishments I might face playing themselves out in my mind.
“Stand up and dust yourself off, doofus,” he finally ordered. “You’ve got potato chip crumbs in your hair, for crying out loud. I’m amazed Mom even lets you out in public.”
Bobby bent to pick up the canteen I’d dropped. “Who said you could use this?” he demanded, shaking it. At the dim sound of water, he tipped the canteen over his head, dousing himself while I stared up at him.
“This is mine, and don’t you forget it,” he warned. But his wet face frowned rather than balling up as usual into a scarlet thunderhead of fury. “Actually,” he added, rubbing a hand over his face now, “it was Dad’s. So be careful with it, would ya?” He gave the canteen back to me and told me to go inside to fill it up. “All I need is for you to die of heat stroke,” he said.
I held the canteen in its rough, khaki fabric cover with its faded Boy Scouts insignia and metal snaps, marveling that my dad had done the same thing at least once. As I hung the canteen’s strap over my right shoulder, Bobby plunged both his hands into the pockets of his shorts and came out with a crumpled five-dollar bill. “Then you have to do me a favor, though,” he announced. I stopped short and stifled a moan.
“I was going to buy you a treat at Clancy’s, but you never actually made it there did you, genius?” Bobby struggled to put the edge back into his voice, but it had gone for the day. “So now you can ride all the way there, like I did, and get a box of popsicles. And if you’re quick and don’t DROP anything, you can have one when you get back.”
That’s how I found myself pedaling in and out of as many shady spots as possible on my way to town, sipping from my dad’s old canteen, marveling that a single long, hot summer day with no friends in sight and an irritated big brother in charge could still offer up its share of surprises. And I was in for yet another as I entered Clancy’s Silver Star through one of its automatic swinging doors. The air-conditioned breeze that washed over my face and body, releasing my clothes from their sweaty attachment to my skin, refreshed me as much as any dip in a pool or lake ever could. And it was something I could get myself—with just a little bit of work. I decided right then and there it was all worth it.
A native of Syracuse, New York, and a graduate of Syracuse University, Karen DeGroot Carter lives in Denver. Her novel, One Sister’s Song, was published by Pearl Street Publishing of Denver; her short stories have been recognized by Writer’s Digest and Glimmer Train Stories and published in BigCityLit; her poetry has appeared in Interim, North Dakota Quarterly, Nixes Mate Review, California Quarterly, and other journals; and her nonfiction has appeared in Publishers Weekly, Literary Mama, and many other publications.