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Let me be very clear: Harris was never getting the truck. Some night when I was out with friends who had cars, or staying in? Sure, whatever. That night? Hell no.
Margot was on a year abroad in France, and I could have been starting university myself, but our parents literally begged me to take a gap year. Running the orchard was taking all their time, and they wanted another driver within reach in case of Harris-related emergency. It was another instance in a long line of instances of our family life warping around Harris. Not that that was a bad thing – congenital heart defects are no joke. I love my brother, it's just a bad idea to let the baby of the family think the world revolves around them, even if it kind of does. (I didn’t come up with that idea completely on my own, even though it’s a self-evident truth. I never had the chance. We heard it a ton from social workers attached to the cardio unit at Children’s Eastern Ontario.) As the middle kid, I took it on as my job to maintain the proper order of the universe by terrifying my older sibling and tyrannizing the younger one. You're welcome.
Point is: I agreed to be Mom and Dad’s emergency backup, but my services were not free. I’d have held out for my own car if I had thought they could afford one. I got what I could get: I had priority on the truck.
Of course, they didn’t tell Harris that. As far as Harris was concerned, the truck was up for the same kind of grabs as it had been between me and Margot when I was in grade 10 and Margot was in grade 12. Harris did not even slightly know the machinations Margot and I had engaged in about who got the truck. Presenting a united front to our little brother was important to both of us.
Mom and Dad were supposed to be the enforcers on our truck deal. If we both wanted to take the truck out, they had agreed to be the official arbiters who would fairly and impartially consider everyone’s needs and give me the keys every time.
This was pretty out of character for them. They genuinely tried to be as fair as possible, in light of the awful situation of having one kid who had much higher needs than the other two. They always wanted to hand everything out in equal pieces, or to share their reasoning when they couldn’t. I could see it was kind of killing them to be unfair to Harris without explaining that they were being fair to me. They did okay over the summer, before Margot got on a plane for Paris. Once she was out of town, they started to waver. By October, their resolve was looking pretty threadbare. Without some help, there was no way they were going to be able to hold up their end of the deal.
My baby brother has always had a nose for opportunity. It’s how he wound up as social media manager for a MLH team, and dating the handsomest guy on it. In re: the truck, Harris identified our parents’ weakest spots and mounted a strategic assault. It didn’t matter how often doctors told our folks that Harris would live a perfectly normal life, nothing was as convincing as Harris actually doing normal things. Don’t ask me why resenting your older sister wasn’t reassuringly normal, but taking a date to a house party was. The one time I went to a house party in high school, they grounded me for a month. Parent logic is weird. Harris was giving them heart eyes about the guy in his geography class, and the only thing keeping it from working was that every time they suggested that maybe I could reschedule with Mike, I told them more about how great Mike was and how long I had been flirting with him. From what we were telling our parents, Harris’s crush was the next big thing in K-pop and I had long-awaited plans with the second coming of Jesus.
At this point, you may be thinking I’m terrible. Evil. Opposing true love to enforce a sibling pecking order when I should be above that kind of thing. Bullshit. The boy he wanted to go out with was an absolute disaster. He dated my friend Krista's younger sister the year before, and cheated on her because she said she wasn’t ready to have sex.
Not to say I wasn’t beefing with Harris. I had real, actual, good reasons. That week alone, he had snaked out on multiple nights when he was supposed to do the dishes, borrowed my favorite jacket without asking, and used my conditioner. Twice.
Mike and I did date for years and get married, but when all this was happening, he was just the person I happened to have plans with while I was taking a stand about the truck. I didn’t want to be reminding Mom and Dad of our agreement every time Harris wanted to experiment with normalcy in the form of bad choices. I needed to get everyone back in line, and I needed to do it without the nuclear option, which would have been breaking my parents’ confidence by telling Harris that the universe did, in a somewhat humiliating fashion, revolve around him. I made a plan.
It would have been bees if I could have figured out how.
On the afternoon in question, I helped out by running some farm errands. While I was out, I stopped off and got a sandwich, which I ate most of. I took the bacon off and left it on the floor in the back of the cab, on top of a little nest I made from a flannel shirt Harris had forgotten there. I left the doors open for almost half an hour while I unloaded crates from the truck bed.
I have never driven as carefully in my entire life as I drove to pick up Mike. The second worst thing would have been having to let the skunk out before I had acquired a witness. (The absolute worst would have been skunk spray in the actual truck.) Fortunately, everything went perfectly. Mike noticed a scratching sound right on schedule, conveniently close to the spot where I’d picked up my stripey friend. Some time on a back road had always been part of my plans for the evening. Before the skunk waddled off, Mike had taken a chance on kissing. If I hadn’t told Mom that Mike walked on water in advance, I’d have said so after. A man who kisses like that while waiting for a skunk to vacate the premises is a man to at least investigate further. Seeing how everything turned out, I guess we can say this story is romantic.
I was still pretty star-eyed at breakfast the next morning, when Mom asked how my date went, but not so star-eyed that I couldn’t tell her and Dad about how we’d sat in a parking lot waiting for a skunk to get bored and go home. They looked at Harris before I had a chance to point a finger in his direction. He protested – of course – but it’s basically family legend now that he lured a skunk into the truck to get back at me for the totally fair process by which I was taking the truck out and he was not. I think they were secretly even pleased at how capable they thought Harris was for taking that revenge on me. I had no trouble about the truck for the rest of the year.
It didn’t stop him from stealing my conditioner. I'll tell you that story some other time.