A Phone Call Between Brothers

Part 4 of a Serial Story of Repentance

Mike’s grapefruit juice was no longer cold by the time he called his brother Trevor. The idea to pray for his younger brother Trevor had been too electric to ignore. Mike was a firm believer in the trustworthiness of what he took to be promptings from the Holy Spirit, and so he’d stopped reading his book and spent fifteen minutes praying for Trevor. He knew his brother had moved out and was living with a girl they’d went to high school with. He’d told him once a few months ago that he should reconcile with Jenn and be the husband and father his family needed, but when Trevor had raised his voice and swore a few times and, eventually, hung up the phone angrily, that was the end of any direct influence Mike had on the situation.

Every conversation with Trevor had to have a joke in the beginning if Mike wanted to give himself a reasonable chance of not making his brother angry.

“There’s a guy at a table across the restaurant from me here who looks exactly like Robert Duvall, and I’m going to whistle the Apocalypse Now theme in a minute to just to see if he looks up. If it turns out to be him, do you want me to tell him Lonesome Dove is your favorite movie?”

“If you do, I’ll napalm you.”

“What’s going on, man? How have you been?”

“Pretty crappy.”

“Work?”

Mike heard a two-second pause, but he had enough confidence in how the conversation had started to simply wait patiently.

Trevor laughed a real laugh, if not a long one. “What do I do if she won’t take me back.”

“I don’t know. But you have to try. And don’t walk in that door until you’re ready to tell her sorry and mean it. And after that, you can live with what happens.”

“Thanks, Mike.”

“You bet. I’ll tag you in the photo when I post it on Facebook.”

Trevor hung up the phone feeling a little better in one way and a little worse in two. He was settled in what the right thing to do was, and that was a freeing thing. For a man to know what he’s supposed to, the door he has to open and walk through, is a very freeing thing. The act of thinking and weighing options and calculating and justifying one choice over another as you argue with yourself in your mind, that sort of thing is exhausting. To be resigned and resolved to simply go home, ring the doorbell, look your wife in the eyes, and say sorry, that removes all that struggle. But Trevor was now scared of being humiliated when his wife told him to leave, and he still wasn’t sure how he could be happy going back to how things were. Actually, how things were plus the weight of a year of living in an apartment with a girlfriend hanging around his neck for at least a few years to come.

There was a CD in Trevor’s glovebox that he had never listened to. Now that he though about it, Trevor had never used the CD player in his Accord. He listened to talk radio and his Spotify. But his sixty-nine-year-old father had given him a CD of a sermon his pastor had preached that for some reason he thought his son might like, or so he said, and since he loved his dad he had been polite enough to not throw it in the trash once out of sight. And now, on what he thought was some sort of desperate grab for any branch or ledge on his tumble down a mountain, he put the thing in his CD player and decided to drive the entire 275 loop around the city until he could say sorry to Jenn and mean it. He slid the thing in and turned the volume up to near max.