I found him down at the riverbank. Larry had disappeared on Thursday. No one had heard from him for three days. Found him down there shivering in the early October morning frost. Laying under a rotting log.

We stopped as we walked up the driveway, and Malcolm had come bounding out the front door. She checked herself at the top of the steps when she saw us, put her hands up to her mouth so that the dishtowel she was holding looked like some crazy vomit caught in suspended animation, flapping there in the wind.

Larry’s glasses were broken and lying in the mud when I found him. Now they hung off his face a little, dangerously close to falling to the driveway where his eyes were transfixed.

He hadn’t said much on the way home and I was afraid for him when he had to talk to Malcolm. He had told me about Amy, and I knew that it was bad.

We had walked home reluctantly, I’m not sure why I was so scared. My left hand was unburdened with gold. But his was heavy with it and Malcolm’s hand had a similar band.

I wanted to trounce him, but knew enough to keep it to myself. He was my brother and I was thankful, mostly, that he was alive.

Amy saw me at the jukebox on Thursday and had run out of the bar into the darkness. When I got to her house, Larry’s truck was parked in the yard. I went inside to find her, alone, crying by the fireplace. I had turned on my heel to go look for him, and walked the dirty streets of the North side until daybreak.

I slept briefly that day and set out again. Wasn’t ‘till this morning that I finally found him, shivering, and I had slept little and restlessly for three days.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he had said.

“I know,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

And now he stood in the driveway with his terrible secret about to spill out, like a deer gutted in the snow. I wanted to say something, anything. To him. To Malcolm. But I stood still, clasping my hands behind my back, and waited for one of them to speak.