Matt Largo

Red King

We split the house, Simon and me, and I couldn’t complain. I got the garage. Simon had it worse. God knew what was still collecting dust in the old house, our father’s collected history of us, of his life before the divorce, before he moved in with Denise to hers, and, eventually, the pair of them pulled up stakes to find their own new frontier untrammeled by memories of either ex. I visited that new house once, the year after they moved in. It looked like a real-estate staging. Here’s the living room. Here’s the dining room. Here’s where we’re planning the addition. Here’s the kitchen. No pictures on the walls. This is the world we built, without you in it. And why shouldn’t he? He brought us up, as best he could, along with our mother. Why did I feel like he owed anything to us?