Chapter 2 - The Yellow House
I refused to get into Dominic's car.
He offered to buy everything on my table so I could leave for the day, but that felt too close to the five hundred dollars he'd tried to give me.
"If you want to talk," I said, "you can wait until I'm finished working."
His assistant checked her watch.
He asked her to reschedule his next appointment.
For an hour he stood under the awning while I sold two wallets, mended a broken umbrella, and answered questions from customers who had no idea my entire childhood had just walked back into the rain.
He did not interfere.
He did not offer the money again.
When I folded the table, he helped carry it to my storage locker after I agreed.
That small courtesy did more to calm me than his tailored coat or the nervous people calling his phone.
We went to a diner where the waitress knew me by name.
I chose a booth by the window.
Dominic asked permission before sitting opposite me.
"Tell me what you remember," he said.
"I remember you leaving."
He swallowed.
"What happened before that?"
I hadn't told the story in years.
Our mother, Isabel Moreno, had worked nights at a nursing home and taken in sewing jobs to make the rent on the yellow house.
Our father left when Danny was a baby.
When Mother died suddenly from a brain aneurysm, I was seventeen and Danny was thirteen.
I tried to keep us together.
I bought groceries with tips from the diner and told the school we were waiting for a relative.
Eventually a counselor discovered we were alone.
The county arranged emergency care.
At the office, I was told that someone had found a foster placement for Danny, and that I would be staying with my aunt Ruth until arrangements could be made for us to see each other.
I watched a black sedan pull away with my brother inside.
He stared straight ahead.
He did not wave.
That was the image I had carried through twenty-eight birthdays.
Dominic rubbed his hands together on the tabletop.
"I remember the car."
"Then you remember leaving me."
"I remember a woman telling me you had been taken to a hospital and that I'd see you soon."
His voice cracked.
"Two weeks later, she told me there had been a fire at Aunt Ruth's house. She said you didn't survive."
I laughed once, without humor.
"Ruth's house never burned."
"I know that now."
"You could have looked."
"I was thirteen."
I flinched at the age.
I'd spent so long remembering him as the brother who made a choice that I'd forgotten how little power a thirteen-year-old boy had over a county placement.
Dominic said he had been moved twice before settling with the Vales, a foster family who later adopted him.
They changed his last name when he turned sixteen with his agreement.
He'd believed his sister was dead and had tried not to think about the yellow house because doing so hurt too much.
"How did you become Dominic?" I asked.
"My foster mother said Daniel was the name of a boy with nobody left. I chose Dominic because I wanted a name that belonged to the life I was building."
I didn't know whether I liked the answer.
But I understood that a child could choose something without understanding what he was surrendering.
We sat until the afternoon light began to fade.
Before leaving, Dominic wrote his number on a napkin.
"I don't expect you to trust me today," he said.
"Good."
"But I'd like to find out what happened. Together, if you'll allow it."
At home, I placed his number beside the photograph and took out the box of letters I had never mailed.
I had written to Danny for years, then stopped when every address returned the same answer.
UNKNOWN RECIPIENT.
Near the bottom of the box was a letter from the county, dated sixteen months after our separation.
It said my request for sibling contact had been denied because the younger child was deceased.
I stared at the word deceased.
I had received that letter years after Danny was supposed to have died in a fire.
May you like
But I'd never believed it.
And somebody at the county had recorded that false death as a fact.
