The Mexican Year

Aligning the handgun’s front and back sights, I peer down the barrel at the target. A virgin can of Bud Light. A.K.A. my current nemesis. It sits on the ground cheerfully, daring me to hit it. I’ve already emptied an entire clip of .45 caliber ammo at the goddamn thing. Now I’m reloaded and trying again. Steadying my aim with regular exhalations of steam. Even cheating closer, bootstep by bootstep, until I’m only 10 yards away.

I squeeze the trigger, flexing my arm and shoulder muscles to dampen the recoil. The Glock never kicks as much as I expect. Then I take a deep breath and refocus on the target. The can still sits there. Undisturbed.

Jesus fucking Christ. I pull the trigger as fast as I can, spamming lead. Dirt gouts up and falls again, five times, once for each bullet. It makes for an impressive display, but nothing more. The can remains right where I left it — upright, intact, and full of cheap beer.

“Let me try,” says a female voice off to my left.

Ruthie Krenzel could be a Guns & Ammo centerfold. She’s in a modified Weaver stance and aims her Beretta 9mm pistol with deadly precision. Her blond hair is streaked with highlights and pulled back into a ponytail, revealing a heart-shaped face set with concentration. Somehow she manages to look curvaceous in a thick quilted vest, flannel shirt, and insulated hunting pants.

A single gunshot echoes in the cold air. The can explodes like there’s an M-80 inside.

“Nice,” I sigh for the umpteenth time. Then I make a show of inspecting the Glock, borrowed from my brother’s collection. “I can’t hit shit with this thing. I don’t think Brian has the sights dialed in.”

“Maybe you should try the shotgun instead.” Ruthie isn’t teasing when she suggests it. Her pretty features are clouding up with disenchantment. My masculinity is officially in tatters.

We’re plinking beer cans in the horseshoe depression of an old pond bed on my family’s property. The berm-like slopes are overgrown with scrub oak and sumac turned crimson. Behind us is our borrowed ride — Brian’s new Toyota pickup truck, parked on a gradual incline to stubbled cornfields and a distant gravel road. This was the perfect place for the illicit activities of our teenage years. Wasting ammo with firearms borrowed from our older brothers. Drinking near beer we shoplifted from the Stop-N-Go. Fucking until we were sore and exhausted. Especially fucking until we were sore and exhausted. In summer we spread a blanket and lolled under the stars. In winter we parked and left the engine running, sometimes until it ran out of gas.

“How many times did we come out here in high school?” I ask playfully. “Dozens of times? Hundreds?”

I think Ruthie’s hazel eyes flare with memories, but I can’t be sure. “That was a long time ago.” She says it neutrally, not really looking at me, but not really looking away either.

It’s been like this all Thanksgiving weekend. I can’t shift us into flirtation no matter how hard I try. Anytime I bring up our past or invade her personal space, she deflects me away. It’s as if all the history between us has been sanitized in an autoclave. Nick and Ruthie? Just a couple teenagers who didn’t know each other very well in high school.

I watch her assume a shooting stance again and unload her Beretta at the rest of the six pack. Beer cans rupture and skitter. She misses a couple times, but only a couple.

“Nice, Ms. Krenzel. You’re even better than I remember.”

She ignores the double entendre. “Thanks. I’m sure I get more practice than you. I belong to a gun club up in the Twin Cities, you know.”

My libido can summon any image of her to mind — winsome in mid-blowjob, splayed wide and giggling, nakedly asleep at my side. But in looking at Ruthie, there’s no trace of the coltish tomboy I used to know. She grew up to be somebody different. Somebody unexpected. She’s poised and independent, even a little standoffish, in a way I never foresaw. But she’s still my first girlfriend. And my first ex-girlfriend, I suppose.

We wander back to Brian’s pickup truck. Our shadows fade in and out with the weak sunlight. The scrub oaks shudder, their bare branches catching the wind. A honking V of Canadian geese passes overhead. It’s too late for fall, too early for winter. My father calls this the dying season.

Ruthie seats her Beretta in its foam-padded carrying case and snaps the lid shut. “The reason I wanted to see you before you left is to talk about Brian.” She softens a little, acknowledging my bruised expression. “The main reason, anyway. But we do need to talk about Brian.”

“Brian?” I ask stupidly. The conversation keeps going in directions I never anticipated.

“He’s creeping Kimmie out.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nick, he’s almost stalking her! Ever since she got divorced. He calls so often that she had to block him on caller ID. He still drives past her house a dozen times a day. She wants to involve the cops, that’s how freaked out she’s getting.”

“No shit.” I can’t summon the disbelief to make it a question — no shit? Brian would follow Kimmie around like a mooning calf, whether she wanted him to or not.

“And let’s be honest…” Ruthie tugs on mittens, glancing darkly at the bed of his pickup truck. “He’s a gun nut.”

I can’t argue with that. It looks like we’re transporting an arsenal — and I didn’t even borrow half of Brian’s gun collection. Most of the carrying cases remain locked, the boxes of bullets unopened. “I know he likes guns. Way too much. But he’d never hurt Kimmie, or her kids for that matter. Never in a million fucking years.”

“Would he hurt Kimmie’s boyfriend?”

“She has a boyfriend?” I feel like an idiot before the question is out of my mouth. Of course Kimmie already has a boyfriend. She got the biggest helping of looks in the Krenzel family. She’ll always have a boyfriend — or husband, or fuckbuddy, choosing them from a long line of eager males.

“Seriously, Nick. Do you think Brian would hurt Kimmie’s boyfriend?”

“Look, he’s just another dude who likes your sister. A weird dude, yeah. But harmless.”

I can tell Ruthie is distracted. She takes out her ponytail, releasing a blond cascade. “He’s driving you back to the airport tonight, right? So talk to him. Tell him Kimmie just wants to be left alone. No calling, no driving by her house. Please, make him understand. Or she’ll call the cops.”

I don’t give her the satisfaction of answering. I replace my Glock in its carrying case and slam the tailgate into place. Then I drain my beer — a Stella Artois, as opposed to the Bud Light we’ve been plinking. Finally I peel back my jacket sleeve and check my watch. “We should get going. It’s already past lunchtime.”

“You want to come over to my parents? We still have Thanksgiving leftovers.”

“Yeah. Let’s do that.”

There’s an awkward moment as we brush past each other. The wind kicks up, swirling her hair across my face, my lips. Without thinking I grab her by the elbow. She tilts up, hazel eyes going wide. I kiss her, just like I have a million times. She doesn’t kiss me back.

Afterward Ruthie blushes the color of winter sumac, a hue that clashes with her orange pants. “You happy now?”

“God, I’m sorry. That, that was…I don’t know. Really fucking stupid of me.”

Ignoring my apology, she marches around to the passenger side and clambers in. I join her warily, starting up the truck with a sidelong glance. Her profile is chiseled with resentment. I fumble with the radio, which is playing an inane honky tonk song. “Just drive,” Ruthie hisses, knocking my hand aside to turn off the music. Then she leans back in the seat and pinches her eyes shut, as if she’s sick of this old pond bed and its overlay of memories, a place she never wanted to revisit.

Marriage was just a word to me when Saman first became a picture in my hands. I was a high school senior, 18 years naive, and prohibited from dating because I was a good Muslim girl. While all my American friends were gossiping about crushes and boyfriends and putting out, I was getting married. My family was out of their heads with happiness, and I envisioned a future of movie star closeups and soft-focus kisses and swelling soundtracks, and all the lazy carefree pointlessness of my teenage years aligned into a certainty with a man’s name.

I didn’t know what to expect, marrying Saman. At first I felt like a girl transformed into a woman, glowing with maturity, having sex. Then I stepped into a scene from my childhood, playing house with dolls only for real. After years of domesticity I began to think marriage is a partnership, like two socks that always come out of the washer and dryer together, never losing one another despite countless launderings.

I never imagined I’d feel so utterly alone, more distant from my husband than the stars. I never anticipated running away like I did. And I definitely didn’t expect this — standing behind his recliner in the bluish flickering glow of the television, digging my fingers into the hairy flesh of his shoulders, massaging away the tension of his hard day.

“How does that feel?” I ask after a while, when my forearms begin to cramp.

“Mmmm,” Saman says. His thumb moves on the outstretched remote and the channel changes, from an Egyptian newscast to some kind of televised poker game. “Keep going.”

“In Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus there’s this — ”

“You and your self-help books,” he interrupts dismissively.

I keep going with my fingers and my conversation. ” — there’s this chapter about how men and women have different ideas of contribution to a relationship. Men think in big singular terms, women think in little multiple ones. Like, a man might think supporting her is worth 50 points and then he’s done. But to a woman bringing home a paycheck is only 1 point. To her everything he does is only 1 point. A paycheck, flowers, taking out the garbage. 1 point. So a man needs to do lots of little things to make a woman happy.”

“That is the most stupid thing I have ever heard.” There’s another click from beneath Saman’s thumb. The TV jumps to a football game. Giants in body armor move in regimented ways — separating from each other, huddling, lining up — then break into chaos again. “Americans are funny, calling this game football and the real football soccer.”

“Can I have my cellphone back?” I sigh. “I’d like to talk to my family more often.”

“You can talk to them anytime you want. On my cellphone.”

“But that means I can only talk to them when you’re here.”

“Exactly. You must regain my trust. Then you can have your cellphone back.” He flips to an animal show about penguins. His shoulders bob impatiently beneath my flagging hands. “Keep going.”

“My arms are getting tired. Can I take a break?”

“I said keep going!”

His explosion startles me back into vigorous massage. I dig my fingers into the hairy flesh, pain flaring up my arms.

“Like that, yes. Mmmm.”

For a while we’re locked in our relative positions. Saman tires of the animal show and flips back to the football game. I try to lose myself in the vivid hues radiating from the screen — unnaturally green fields, stark uniform colors, referees in black and white.

“My mother is coming for a visit,” he says after a while.

“What?” I almost shriek.

“I thought you might like some company.” There’s a smugness to his tone. Company — yeah, right. She’s going to watch me when he can’t.

“You don’t know what your mother is like when you’re not here. All she does is nag me. About my cooking, even my cleaning. And especially about starting a family.” I approximate her nasally Farsi. “Een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad?” — When are you going to give Saman a son?

“She nags me as well.” He reaches back to pat one of my forearms, which has gone so numb I can barely feel his touch. “We are married five years now. Our families are impatient for children.” His voice softens. “That is your real problem, Nooshin. A wife without children is unhappy. She only has her husband to live for. You will be happy when we have children.”

I think of the birth control pills I tip into my palm every morning. The mechanistic act I endure almost every night. My belly swelling with new life, his and mine. Trying to nurse a baby with this flat useless chest. Then trying to nurse another, and maybe another. Raising a family in his itinerant shadow. The forever with him — and my mother-in-law, and the rest of his family. The forever and ever and ever.

“I want you to stop taking your pills.” Saman tilts back to look at me. His face is more handsome upside-down. “Yes?”

“Maybe,” I finally say, and the word meant to be an evasion feels more like a bottomless collapse, a girl free-falling inside herself.

It’s the day after Thanksgiving and I’m sitting wrapped in a blanket on the porch, drinking coffee like sludge and squinting at the hazy orb climbing out of the bowels of Wisconsin. The bucolic quietude of the big rural empty is retreating with the night. A hundred yards away I-35 is flooding with holiday traffic, glinting colorful waves of suburban assault vehicles and overloaded minivans and the occasional barreling semi.

The door bangs open and shut behind me. Brian drops his substantial bulk into the Adirondack chair next to mine. Its wooden slats make threatening noises of collapse. “My fucking back,” he grimaces, trying to get comfortable.

It’s always something with my brother. He’s got a bad back, and recurrent migraines, and knees that ache, and god knows what else. I keep telling him it’s psychosomatic, the toll of contorting himself into my parents’ fucked-up worldview so he can work the farm with Dad. He keeps telling me I’m full of shit.

“I wish I’d seen Wendy.” He says it as if he’s discussing the weather, looking down the swelling girth of his overalls, wiping breakfast crumbs off.

A typical conversation with Brian — I’m already exasperated. “You can see Wendy anytime, dude. She only lives in Des Moines. Why don’t you swing by her place on your way home from the airport?”

“Maybe I’ll do that.”

“You ever been to her place?”

“Nah. I don’t like that creepy boyfriend of hers. I got the address, though.” He takes off his blaze-orange hunting cap to scratch his head. Underneath the greasy blond hair resembles a monk’s tonsure. He’s less bald than I am, which doesn’t seem fair considering he’s a decade older. “When do you fly back?”

I pull the blanket up to my chin. “Not until Sunday. Do we just get shit-faced until then?”

“How about this? We get shit-faced today, and hang out at Krenzels’ tomorrow.”

The Krenzels were our closest friends growing up, a Catholic birth control experiment that resulted in five boys and three girls. Brian was tight with the older Krenzel kids, I was tight with the younger ones. They were one of those families perpetually on the brink of losing their land, mailbox stuffed with FINAL NOTICE envelopes, every harvest maybe the last. There’s no such thing as an honest living on a couple hundred acres, not in this era. You have to plant marijuana in between the corn rows or cook meth in the machine shed. Now Brian is telling me that the bank finally foreclosed and everything went at auction. Mr. and Mrs. Krenzel live in the dead-end town of Somber — you can’t make this shit up — where families blow in off the land and collect like dead leaves.

“Is Ruthie home to visit?” I ask with wary hopefulness.

“Why? You still got a boner for her?”

“Maybe. I’d have to see her again first. Has she porked out?”

Brian throws back his multiple chins to roar with laughter. Beneath him wood screws moan.

Ruthie and I grew up together, a simple friendship that got all mixed up and complicated with our cruel, cruel puberties. One year she was an awkward coltish teen with braces and really bad skin, usually looking as though she was about to walk into a wall. The next year she was a blooming woman-child trying to master her new jutting boobs and the effect they had on boys like me. Her brothers — all friends of mine — jovially threatened me with death if I messed around with their little sister. Like that stopped me when I was a hormonal idiot and she was a heart-shattering vista of desire.

“When was the last time you saw her?” Brian is asking.

“God, I don’t know. Four or five years ago, maybe?” A sudden thought grips me. A thought named Nooshin. “Did Ruthie get married?”

“Nope. She’s still single, far as I know.” He rubs his massive hands together and blows into them, making steam leak out between his fingers. “Remember Kimmie? She’s here through the weekend. She finally divorced that asshole. Cleaned him out. Got the house and the snowmobiles too.”

“Kimmie needs it. Three kids, right?”

“Four now. All girls. Just as beautiful as their mom.”

Kim — Kimmie in the Krenzel nicknaming convention — is Ruthie’s oldest sister and the center of Brian’s sad mooning universe. Ruthie and I were in elementary school when they graduated together, posing in their rented gowns and mortarboards, blinking into the hot summer sun. At that age I was struck by her blond gossamer hair, which looked just like the cornsilk Dad had me detasseling. Now I’d describe her as a pale prairie Ophelia who seemed to glow with phosphorescence. But she was always chased by guys more rico suave than Brian.

He heaves himself to his boots, encrusted with layers of dried mud flaking off. “You ready for a beer?”

“Dude, we can’t let Mom catch us. It’s not even breakfast yet.”

“Mom’s cooking tastes better if you’re drunk.”

“I heard that!” Mom bellows through the door where she’s been eavesdropping, and suddenly I’m so happy I’m practically losing my mind, because I don’t have to subject myself to this troika of dysfunctional misery addicts for another year.

Dull torpid sleeplessness, and I’m urgently waiting on the nightstand clock. Willing the green digits to turn faster. Hurry up, hours. Drain away into morning.

I’ve been here a lot lately, adrift on our mattress, tracing shadow-patterns on the ceiling with a raised fingertip, listening to Saman drone and snort next to me. I just wish tonight’s insomnia was due to the dinner I botched, because that khoresht — lamb and vegetable stew — was certainly deserving of blame. Next time I’ll stop at a pinch of paprika. Happiness should be such simple restraint.

I want to ghost around the apartment, looking for distractions. Tidying the silverware drawer. Watching the satellite TV channels we get from the Persian Gulf. Trying to guess the secret new password on the computer so I can get online again. But Saman wants me here, miserably awake in bed, all night long. Any escape — even if it’s just to the living room — is a threat to his peace of mind.

Yesterday Nasrin called me on Saman’s cellphone. Apparently she and Mom were wondering how different my life has become, now that I returned home to my grateful husband. I admitted enthusiasm for all the changes I hoped to experience, a long walk of anticipation from the airport gate to the curbside pickup, searching the line of windshields for the man who was welcoming me home. But then I glimpsed Saman behind the wheel — slouching, aggrieved, resentful Saman — and I felt a sickening sensation of love nailed to contempt and futility. Of course, I didn’t tell Nasrin that. I just said I was a little disappointed so far. Behind her cheerful words I could tell she was disappointed too. The aftermath of my month in San Diego shouldn’t be so anticlimactic.

I debate whether to pass some time with my clip-on reading light. On the nightstand are Dr. Phil’s Relationship Rescue Workbook and our leatherbound Qu’ran with the buckle around it. Right now that kind of reading seems pointless. Saman doesn’t think our marriage needs any relationship rescue, and even the Qu’ran’s proscriptions seem to backfire.

I slide a hand between my thighs, testing the soreness. Saman was angry with me, a darkness that boiled into slamming. Not because I ruined dinner and we needed to order pizza instead, although that didn’t help. During the sex act I suggested being more adventurous. After all, the Qu’ran states that I’m a field for him to till, and he can till that field any way he wants. So why keep having sex the same way, every time, for five years? Above me his face was a slideshow of emotions — shock, then something like abject terror, and finally a cold harsh closing — and my voice went someplace far away. It hasn’t come back yet.

On final approach Iowa is a cold earth-toned patchwork quilt coming closer, resolving into individual farms bracketed by gravel roads, then blacktop and the occasional subdivision, and finally the exceedingly modest sprawl of Des Moines at the confluence of the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers. The so-called international airport looks like somebody bulldozed the cornfields on the southwest edge of town and paved them over with two gigantic dragstrips for monster truck racing. The airport’s multistory parking ramps are the highest elevation for miles.

“Can you believe all that green grass?” the omelette-faced businessman next to me wheezes. He’s been rubbing my nerves raw since we left Los Angeles 1,500 miles ago — snotting into a grubby handkerchief, nodding off against my shoulder, making inane smalltalk. “Day before Thanksgiving and the grass ain’t even dormant yet. It’s still looking like September down there. Well, except for all the leaves being gone. Can’t forget that bit, I guess.”

I listen to tendons snap in my fist, clenching and unclenching and clenching again.

The Iowan diaspora is comprised of gigantic jellyfish stuffed into denim and sweatshirts and seed caps. They move toward the baggage claim in a slow avalanche. I’m chasing daylight, darting between their fleshy elbows and hips. My only luggage — a backpack — is slung over my shoulder. Finally I plunge through the glass doors and into the narrow concrete alley between the terminal and its parking ramps, a wind tunnel funneling the prairie breeze into an arctic blast.

An antiquated Ford F-150 nudges the curb in two-toned glory, white and aqua velva. Wendy waves at me through the windshield. A manager of something-or-other at Meredith Publishing, the biggest employer in Des Moines, and my sister is still driving a pickup with 150,000 miles on it. A hand-me-down from Dad. Same way he gave me the keys to the Ford Explorer when I graduated from high school. We’ll drive our vehicles until they shred into rust. You can take the kids out of the parsimonious Roberts family, but you can’t take the parsimonious Roberts family out of the kids.

Wendy is an Aryan pixie with a tragic blond bob and eyes the color of a Beverly Hills swimming pool. She’s wrapped in a pink corduroy jacket and mashing the truck’s pedals with shearling boots. A cigarette is parked in the corner of her mouth. The bright tip jerks in interrogation. “You have a good flight?”

“Good enough to get here,” I say.

“Good.” A typical exchange in our family. Three sentences, three goods.

I’m flashbacking to the driving lessons she gave me in this pickup, back when I was 15 and she was 21. How to drive a stick. It was a boiling summer day with heat waves rising off the gravel road. The windows were rolled down and locusts flitted in and out of the cab like tiny crashlanding helicopters. She was wild and ponytailed and laughing, even when I stalled out for the bazillionth time.

The woman next to me is 33 now. I search her profile for any trace of the bratty artistic girl who drove my parents — all of us, really — to distraction. I remember stealing into her bedroom and reading her secret teenage diaries, full of triple exclamation points, violently underlined words, and boys’ names written in loops that fanned across several lines. This Wendy looks like she never has a triple-exclamation-point thought in her head, never feels anything that deserves underlining.

“Why are you doing this to yourself?” I ask, genuinely curious. She’s been AWOL from family gatherings for the last two years on the advice of her therapist.

“Why are you here?” she snaps. Another typical exchange in our family. Answer every question with a question.

“I came to say goodbye to everybody. I’m moving to Mexico next year. Living in Tijuana.”

“For your research?”

“Yeah.”

Wendy nods to herself, as if I’m confirming all her best — or worst — suspicions. Then she stabs out her cigarette butt in the crowded ashtray and fumbles another Virginia Slim to her mouth. “We still live in the same house. You remember the one.” She waves in the direction of East Village, a preservation district of slumping warehouses and decaying apartment buildings and nasty old Victorian-style homes.

By “we” I assume she’s including Glenn, her longtime boyfriend. A misanthropic software geek who looks like he’s made of melted wax. “I’ve never been to your place. Only seen pictures.”

The cigarette tip jerks. “Really?”

“Really.”

That’s it for conversation until we reach the highway, where Wendy can relax and leave the pickup in fifth gear. The drive up I-35 is a lot of flat stubbled cornfields and not much else. The only topographical relief is the occasional overpass leading to half-dead towns of plastic sheeting and tarpaper and septic tanks. Meanwhile she talks my ear off. Bitching about this, bitching about that, chainsmokechainsmokechainsmoke.

Ames is a brief sideways glimmer of grain elevators and water towers poking above a bare-branched forest of oaks. On the north side of town we pass the USDA research lab, a low-slung campus of whitewashed cinderblock buildings with steel roofs. The only place in America that can conclusively test for mad cow disease. On the opposite side of the highway is an office park advertised by a B-24 bomber on a pole.

I stare out the windshield at a landscape ironed flat. The miles crawl by. Wendy is rehashing the litany of parental transgressions against her, imploding with sad grievances. I relive those scenes from my customary place on the periphery of our family. Wendy slouching with sharp elbows at the breakfast table, lips ghoulish with thick white lipstick, saying “Mom, don’t be stupid, everybody in town wears it.” Wendy scandalizing my parents with a crop art panel, the seeds forming a slutty pinup girl modeled after one of Dad’s calendars in the barn. Wendy acting like an idiot on drugs and clutching Mom’s legs moaning “Oh please, please! Make love to me David!” Wendy getting dragged into the farmhouse by her hair after a botched attempt to run away.

Our exit — the last before Minnesota — finally creeps into view. Turn left and you hit 600 of our 800 acres abutting the highway. Normally I’d just sit back and watch the familial fireworks, same as I’ve always done, but I feel obligated to voice the thoughts in Wendy’s head. “You sure you’re up for this?”

“Not really.” She downshifts into motionlessness at the top of the exit ramp. Beyond the stop sign is empty blacktop disappearing toward either horizon.

“You could drop me off and go home to Glenn. I can get a ride back to the airport from Brian.” Brian is our older brother who works the farm with Dad.

Wendy exhales a plume of smoke, considering it. “They’d probably never talk to me again. You think?”

I shrug.

“Goddamnit.” She puts the truck into gear, face souring into resignation.

Growing up each of us coped with Mom and Dad in our way. Brian contorted himself into their dysfunctional ideal of the perfect son, whirling in a stupid codependent orbit that continues to this day. Wendy rebelled with smoking and bad boys and worse behavior, launching into an adult life underwritten by therapy and Prozac. I learned to survive in the minefield of my family and use distance — the emotional kind, as well as the stuff you measure in miles — as my defense.

Shadows are lengthening across the farmstead when we finish bouncing down the long gravel driveway into towering oaks and maples that seem stuck into the ground upside down. Anal. That’s what you think when you look at this place. Everything is immaculate, even the wooden outbuildings that were built when Eisenhower was president. Only the old farmhouse didn’t make it to the 21st century, replaced by a new suburban-style rambler that looks like it was dropped here by a tornado. The freshly-mown lawn around it is growing a bumper crop of lawn schlock — mawkish gnomes, posed plastic deer, narrow decorative things on poles that point into the wind. A dog peels off from the barn and races toward us, barking loud enough to wake the dead.

“You know what?” Wendy says, leaning over to give me an awkward one-armed hug. “I think I’m just gonna drop you off after all. Happy Thanksgiving.”

She peels out in her haste to escape, spattering my pants with gravel. Then the front door opens and fills with the huge silhouette of my brother, and I start to raise a hand in greeting, and 85 pounds of German shepherd hits me like a train.