Chapter 19: Douglas and Hamish

Douglas had not expected the week in Scotland to fix things with his brother. He had expected it to produce a short-term proximity and then a return to the decade of managed distance. The managed distance ended somewhere in the drive home from Edinburgh after the six-month dinner. They drove in Hamish's car, which was old and smelled of the dog he'd had for eight years and which Douglas had never met, and somewhere on the motorway Hamish said: 'Why did you really stay away?' They had been talking around this for the whole trip. Douglas had been preparing, privately, a version of the answer that was honest without being completely destabilizing. He gave the completely destabilizing version instead. 'Because being around you reminded me of what I'd walked away from and I wasn't sure I could face it.' Hamish drove for a mile without speaking. 'The town,' he said. 'The town and everything in it. Our parents. The life I thought I was escaping by leaving.' He looked out at the dark motorway. 'You stayed. You made something there. And I couldn't come back because seeing that you'd done the thing I'd been too afraid to do would require me to admit I was afraid.' Another mile. 'You're an idiot,' Hamish said. Affectionately. 'Yes.' 'The town isn't what it was. Our parents aren't who they were. I'm not who I was.' A pause. 'Come back for a weekend. See it properly. If it's still not for you, that's an actual decision based on actual information instead of a ten-year avoidance.' Douglas looked at his brother in the dark of the motorway and thought about seven strangers in a drawing room, all of them finding things they hadn't known they were looking for. 'Okay,' he said. 'A weekend.' He went the following month. He stayed for three weeks. The town had changed. So had he. Some things were worth reconsidering.