At quarter to noon, I take my cell phone into my parents’ bedroom and call Timothy. I figure with the shift he’s on, we’ll only have about a half hour before he’ll have to get ready for work, and I can’t imagine what we have to say to fill that time as it is, so I don’t want to give him more than that. Joey sits in the living room, watching tv, and because the bedroom is directly behind the television, I can hear it muffled through the wall. Closing the door, I stretch out across my parents’ double bed and put the cell on speaker. As I listen to it ring, there’s a very small part of me that hopes he doesn’t answer.
Finally the ringing stops. I watch the timer on the phone tick through five long seconds of silence before I ask, “Hello?”
“Brian,” Timothy says, his voice neutral. I can’t te
