Read Online When You Were Older by Catherine Ryan Hyde - Free Book Online

pace in that special way that only Ben paced. I’d forgotten all about it.
    The refresher course didn’t take long.
    My brother Ben didn’t pace in a straight line. And he didn’t go around in a circle either, though the effect was similar. Ben paced endless squares. Out with the left foot, out with the right, sharp ninety-degree left turn, repeat. Around and around in a clumsy box of his own creation. All he had to do was miss a turn to escape the box. But he never did. Until he was damn good and ready.
    ‘Why wouldn’t I
see
her?’ he wailed.
    ‘Ben, I—’
    ‘You tell me why I wouldn’t
see
her, Buddy. Why wouldn’t I
see
her?’
    And that was my second fast refresher. After the pacing box, the broken record. Once Ben got off on a tear like that, repeating the same impassioned question more than two or three times, his clutch seemed to stick. No more shifting gears for some time.
    I was in for a long night.
    Brilliant, Russell, I thought. You sure did a stellar job on that.
    Unclear for the moment on how these situations used to be handled – I was remembering each phase of this as I went along – I jumped up and tried to stop him. I stood in front of him, so he’d have to stop his obsessive box-pacing to keep from bowling me down.
    Then I was on the rug looking up at the ceiling, and wondering how badly I’d twisted the muscle I felt twanging in my back.
    He hadn’t struck me. He hadn’t even pushed me out of the way. He just hadn’t stopped.
    ‘Buddy,’ I said, absorbing his panic. ‘Stop.’
    ‘But why wouldn’t I
see
her?’
    I ducked out of the TV room, and into the living room, where I breathed long and deeply. I could still hear him, repeating the same question. Over and over. And over. And over.
    What did we used to do, my mom and me?
    Well. I knew the answer to that.
We
didn’t.
She
did.
    Then I was hit with a strange thought. Here I was telling Ben to be open to feeling Mom with him. Was I willing to try the cure I was prescribing?
    ‘OK, Mom,’ I said. ‘What did you used to do?’
    Chalk it up to the fact that I’d turned my mind a hundred per cent to the question. Because I don’t forget things. So if I hadn’t known before, it’s because I hadn’t yet tried to remember.
    ‘Cookies,’ I said out loud.
    When Ben would get stuck, our mom would bake cookies. And Ben’s tantrum would last just about as long as it took her to bake them, and let them cool a bit. And then she’d bring them in to Ben and say, ‘Look, honey. Cookies.’ And by then he’d be tired and rundown, and enough of a distraction could break the cycle. And cookies were enough of a distraction.
    There was only one problem. I didn’t know how to bake cookies.
    ‘Well, Mom?’ I asked.
    And then I had another remembering. When we were little, she’d made them from scratch. But then later, when she had enough to do looking after Ben, she’d given that up. Gone instead to the type you buy at the market, as unbaked tubes of dough. Because the difference was lost on Ben anyway.
    I ran to the kitchen. Even in the kitchen I could hear him.
    ‘You tell me, Buddy! You tell me why I wouldn’t see her!’
    I rummaged through the freezer and found no cookie dough. Just my luck these days. But then I thought, maybe you don’t freeze them. Maybe you keep them in the refrigerator. I opened the fridge door, purposely not looking at the postcards.
    And there it was. Granted, I had to lift two casserole dishes to see it. But I found it. Two-thirds of a tube of chocolate-chip cookie dough in a plastic ziplock sandwich bag.
    My luck seemed to be changing.
    I set about following the directions on the tube. But it was hard, because the first couple of words of each sentence had been cut off for previous batches.
    But I got the oven temperature. Three hundred and fifty degrees. And I figured out that you cut the dough into one-inch rounds and cut the rounds into quarters. And then baked them for … that part was cut off. I