Five years. I’d had that car longer than Nick and I had seen each other. It was our place to escape, a getaway, our first home. The Mustang was our everything. But like everything else, it fell apart.

“Don’t be sentimental. It’s past time you traded up, anyway. Dad or I could have gotten you a new car sooner,” River remarked while we cleaned out the old time capsule.

“It’s not just a car,” I told him.

Nick had a few of his old comic books in the trunk. They were the lesser issues too poorly drawn to frame but too important to toss out. My high school letterman jacket was beside them, resting over a small box of socks.

“It’s a car,” River yawned as he found some of our dad’s hunting gear I had almost forgotten was under the seats.

“Nick and I lived in here. This was like our house.”

“Whatever. Your little adventure might have been romantic or some shit, but keep in mind you ran off cuz you assumed your family was a bunch of bigots. You ran off in this piece of shit.”

“You saying you aren’t a bigot?”

I peeked up from behind the car to see my older brother holding everything from a hunting knife to a first aid kit.

“I got nothing against the blacks, the gays, side eyes, or the gays. Hell, the Chinese pay better than most at the dealership,” he argued without much filter.

Did he mean to say “the gays” twice? It was early that Saturday morning. I’m sure there must have been a few neighbors who could hear us had they tried.

“Do you hear yourself?” I laughed.

“I got nothing against the gays, alright. First home or not, sometimes, I wish you had never learned to drive.”

We carried a few things into the house and left them on the kitchen table before heading back out for more. I didn’t want to let the Mustang go, but it had been on its last legs for a while.

“Almost sounds like you missed me,” I teased my brother.

“Must be the fumes.”

He rolled his eyes, but I saw him grin. How long was he going to stay with me? Did he honestly think me and Nick would run away again? Annoying as he might have been, my older brother cared. In his shitty car salesman way, he cared, but was he worried?

“How is Dad doing, anyway?” I asked.

“Why don’t you call him and find out?” River suggested.

I got the last few things from the backseat while he combed through the front for anything we might have missed.

“We haven’t talked since I told him about Malcolm and Cindy. Feels like every time I call him, it’s to ask for a favor,” I admitted.

“Call him. Old bastard doesn’t have long before one of us has to put him in a home.”

“Dad ain’t that old,” I laughed.

“Whoa,” River spoke but not to me.

“What is it?”

He had opened the glove box and found something dangerous inside-the gun.

“Where’d this come from?”

“It’s Dad’s,” I explained and hurried to move so no one on the street would see what my brother was holding.

“How long has it been in here?”

“A while. Think I should get rid of it?”

River held the handgun between us, checking it out and ensuring there weren’t bullets inside. After his quick inspection, he gave me the weapon.

With an indifferent shrug of his shoulders, he suggested, “Dad would tell you to keep it.”

“You think so?”

“I’m telling you to keep it.”

“But we got Malcolm in the house,” I said.

“Either way, you can’t hide it in the car. Tow truck will be here in a few hours. If you don’t want it, I’ll get it back to Dad.”

With everything out of the car, we shut the doors and went inside. Nick, Cindy, and Malcolm hadn’t woken up yet. The house was quieter than I was used to.

Thinking it over, I said, “I’ll hang on to it.”

“You do that. I got a few calls to make. Is there a car you want from the dealership?”

Guns had never been a big deal back in Oklahoma. Everyone had one. It made sense that my brother didn’t think much of the secret I’d kept in the glove box for so long. But I knew Cindy wouldn’t feel the same. Nick wouldn’t either.

River and I talked over what kind of car to have delivered to the house, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the gun. I hid it in the box of socks from the Mustang’s trunk and covered it with my old letterman jacket. With tape from Nick’s office, I sealed the box and hid it in the attic before he or my ex woke up that morning.

By the time Nick had woken up, I had just come down from the weak wooden steps of the attic. With a yawn, he asked me, “What are you doing up there?”

I told him River and I had cleaned out the car. I hadn’t lied about the gun yet, but Nick assumed I had put away a bunch of old junk. He made it easy to leave out information.

It was better to have a gun and not need it than to need it and not have it. With a kid around, it was probably time I got the thing registered and a better place to hide. Even then, I wasn’t planning to tell anyone I had it in the house. I wondered if Nick remembered we had a gun at all. I knew how he felt about firearms. Still, he never debated us having one when we were living out of the Mustang. Things were more dangerous back then. We might have made it through a rough patch, but life could have thrown us any kind of trouble. We were lucky not to have gotten into fights, or worse.

But just because we weren’t on the road anymore didn’t mean life couldn’t screw with us later.