The screwdriver slipped from Peter Calder’s hand and clattered across the porch boards.
It was a small sound, barely anything, metal against old wood in the morning heat.
But later, Peter would remember it as the sound before everything changed.
He had been trying to fix the loose hinge on his front door since 8:12 that Saturday morning.
The job should have taken ten minutes.
The screws were right there in a coffee can beside his knee.
The drill battery was charged.
The hinge was not even badly bent.
Still, he kept stopping, staring at the door, then staring past the porch railing toward the mailbox and the quiet street beyond it.
The air smelled like warm lumber, cut grass, and coffee gone cold in a paper cup near his boot.
A small American flag was stuck beside the mailbox, drooping slightly in the thick July heat.
Somewhere down the block, a mower started, sputtered, and died.
Everything looked like the kind of morning that had no right to become a memory.
Peter wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist and thought, again, of Aaron.
His little brother had loved this porch.
Aaron used to sit there in the evenings with a bottle of root beer, one ankle crossed over the other, laughing like trouble always belonged to somebody else.
He had been that kind of man.
Too trusting sometimes.
Too quick to believe that people meant what they said.
Too proud to admit when he needed help.
Peter had been the older brother by four years, which meant he had spent most of his life pretending he knew more than Aaron did.
But Aaron had a way of making people feel forgiven before they even apologized.
Three years earlier, on an ordinary weekday morning, Aaron’s heart stopped at thirty-five.
No warning.
No long illness.
