I felt a sort of relief when Elias finally died last Tuesday. (Maybe relief is too small a word.) I do not really care how it sounds to people who did not live in this house. I spent thirty years carrying that man on my back like a sack of wet concrete. He was my brother. Back home in the village, you do not throw family out. You just do not do it. My father would have probably killed me if I tried while he was still alive. So I worked the sites. I hauled the timber and I poured the slabs while Elias sat in my spare room and smoked those thin cigarettes from the old country. He hadn't held a real job since 1994. Maybe 1995.