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sandwiches?” the steward asked, and Old Burt ordered three Bud Lights, chugged them like water to mask his symptoms of the churning.
    It worked.
    That was ten years ago.
    It worked.
    “To thine own self,” thought Old Burt.
    But sometimes truth is the last thing you need.

  
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
      
     
       
     
     
     
     
     
     

    TYLER
     
    Truth is, Tyler knew why he kept hanging around Old Burt: Tyler felt sorry for him.
    Well, Tyler felt sorry for Burt, and he liked the old man too. He wasn’t all bad. Sometimes, when it was just them, Tyler kinda thought Burt treated him like family. Shit, of all the people in the tree house, only Tyler knew.
    Once, as they sat on Burt’s porch drinking soda, Tyler asked him, “Why’d you quit?”
    “Quit what?”
    “Drinking?”
    “Ah,” Old Burt had told him, and Old Burt wiped beads of sweat from his glass bottle. He looked Tyler in the eye. “Used to,” he said, “I had a daughter. Michelle,” he said. “That was her name. Died a cancer. About eleven years back.”
    “Oh,” said Tyler. “You quit when she died?”
    “No, no,” said Burt. “Before.” He chuckled. “It was a promise to God.” Burt looked at his shoes. “When Michelle was diagnosed, I was drinking. She and her mom had moved out the house, you see? I was always showing up messed up. Wrecking cars. Interrupting soccer practice.” Old Burt shook his head. “The two girls were done with me, and they should’a been.”
    It was silent. Both Tyler and Burt sipped at their drinks.
    “Michelle’s mother called me up, Brandi,” he said, “that’s her name,” he shook his head, “but I gotta say, I don’t like saying it. But she called me up and told me she and Michelle needed to talk, and they had me drive up to Houston where they were living, took me to a Whataburger and told me the sad news over bad coffee, and I asked how I could help.
    ‘“Burt,’ Brandi told me, ‘You’ve never been much a help at all, but we thought you should know,’ and then Michelle kinda told her mother off for me, told her, ‘you said you wouldn’t do this,’ and then her mother apologized to me, and I said that I understood.
    “And, well, on the way home, it just kinda hit me. I pulled off 59 in Victoria and went down to the Riverside Park and wandered the trails there, and I came across a family picking pecans off the ground, speaking Spanish as they tucked the things into plastic bags, and then, later, I saw a herd of deer standing still off in the woods, and a hurt washed over me, but a stillness too. And I was there in the woods and a sun ray dropped down like a Jacob’s Ladder, and it felt like it landed right on me, and I whispered to it, like a kid might whisper into a tin can telephone, that if God kept my daughter safe, I’d never drink again.
    “I lived up to my end of the bargain, but I guess God had his fingers crossed, because I watched Michelle go skinny as a skeleton, watched all the treatments just bounce off her, maybe even make her worse, and the day she died I was holding her hand, and she said, ‘don’t start when I’m gone,’ and I told her I wouldn’t, and she said, ‘and get back with Mom,’ and I told her I would, and she smiled at me, and her big blue eyes dropped two tears, one from each, and she laid her head back on a pillow and the tears ran toward her ears.”
    Silence sat strong on the porch. No movement.
    “Did ya?” asked Tyler.
    “What?”
    “Stay sober?”
    “I did.”
    “And the mother.”
    Burt smiled. “We were together a while,” he said. “Then one day I went on a fishing trip and she got mad at me. I came back, went to bed, and the next morning, when I woke up, she’d packed her things and was gone,” Old Burt frowned. “She left me an e-mail address, but I’ve never used it. Some things are too fragile to try to put back together.”