Two weeks later, we met at Howard’s office to sign the agreement. It was the first time I’d seen my brother in five months.
He’d lost weight. He looked tired. He wore a wrinkled button-down shirt, and for the first time I could remember, he didn’t walk into the room like he owned it. He sat down across from me and looked at the table.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
Britney wasn’t with him. I learned later that she’d moved out in March. She’d taken the flat-screen TV, the LIVE LAUGH LOVE canvas, and, according to Travis, “every single towel in the house.”
Howard walked us both through the agreement. Travis had hired his own lawyer for an hour to review it, on Howard’s advice, so nobody could ever say he didn’t understand what he was signing.
We’d list the house together with a local real estate agent. Travis would not be the listing agent. Howard had gently pointed out that his license had lapsed anyway, because he hadn’t completed his continuing education hours. Travis would keep living in the house until it sold, but from now on he’d pay the utilities himself, in his own name, and keep the yard mowed.
At closing, after the real estate commission and closing costs, the proceeds would be split. But before the split, I’d be reimbursed from Travis’s half for his share of the taxes and insurance I’d paid to save the house, $2,768.19, and for part of the expenses I’d overpaid during the twenty months we lived there together.
Howard and I had gone over the numbers carefully. My spreadsheet showed I’d overpaid by about $7,765. Howard thought I could probably recover most of it in court, but it would cost thousands in legal fees to fight for it.
I looked at my brother across the table, staring at the papers with his jaw clenched.
“Make it five thousand,” I told Howard. “For the overpayments. Plus the taxes and insurance.”
Travis’s head came up. “Ryan, the spreadsheet says almost eight.”
“I know what it says.”
“Why would you…”
“Because I want this to be over,” I said. “And because Dad wouldn’t want us fighting over every dollar in a lawyer’s office. He’d want it fair. Not perfect. Fair.”
Travis looked at me for a long moment. His eyes were wet.
“Okay,” he said. “Five thousand.”
He signed first. I watched him read every page before he initialed it, his lips moving slightly the way Dad’s used to when he read the newspaper.
The house went on the market in May, listed at $269,900. Our agent, a no-nonsense woman named Carol Fitch, told us to fix the gutter, repair the ceiling stain, and replace the cracked garage window before the photos.
Travis did all three himself.
He watched YouTube videos and borrowed a ladder from the neighbor. He used Dad’s old tools from the garage, the ones still in the battered red toolbox with KEITH HALE stenciled on the lid. He sent me photos of each finished repair with captions.
Gutter fixed. Didn’t fall off the ladder. Dad would be shocked.
Ceiling patched. Took three tries. Looks okay?
I wrote back: Looks good, Trav. Better than okay.
On a Saturday in late May, the weekend before the open house, I drove over to help him clean out the garage.
It was the first time I’d been back since the day I moved out. The yard was freshly mowed, with crisp edges along the sidewalk. Somebody had planted marigolds in the bed by the front porch.
Travis was waiting in the driveway in an old Ohio State T-shirt, holding two cups of gas-station coffee.
“I didn’t know how you take it anymore,” he said, handing me one. “I got you cream and two sugars. That’s how you used to take it.”
“That’s still how I take it.”
He nodded, looking pleased with himself.
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