He has had my key since 1998

Nelson got the key in April of ninety-eight. My mother went down on the driveway on a Tuesday morning while I was in San Leandro closing a quarter, and he heard her from his yard and came over the fence, and then he was stuck at the back door because it was locked and she keeps the spare in a dish on the kitchen counter. He broke the little window by the laundry to get in to her. The glass cost sixty-two dollars and I paid it, and that Saturday I had a key cut at the hardware store on MacArthur that's a mattress place now, a dollar seventy-five, and I handed it to him in his driveway while he was under his truck doing something to the exhaust.

I was married then. Cindy and I were finished in 2003 and it was about money and about her wanting to be down in Fremont near her sister.

My brother Gordon came down from Elk Grove in July. My mother had a small stroke in March, the kind where she was fine again by dinner, and now he wants the house put in a trust. It's in her name. It's been in her name since 1979, when my father was still alive and they paid forty-one thousand for it, and Gordon has an opinion about what the same house is worth on this street today. He walked through the rooms with his phone out, taking pictures for a man he knows who does appraisals.

He stopped in the kitchen and asked why there were two rice cookers. I said one of them is Nelson's, he likes the one that does porridge overnight. He said huh and took a picture of the stove.

Nelson eats here Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. It's been that way since his mother went into the place in San Leandro and he stopped cooking for two. He buys the meat. He's up at five anyway and the market on East 12th is better before nine. I get the rice fifty pounds at a time, and the gas and the electric are mine, which with my mother's television going all day is not nothing. Wednesday and Friday he eats at his own table and I couldn't tell you what he has.

He stays over some nights. My mother's room is at the back of the house and her television is turned up past where any person should have it and she falls asleep with it going. He's out the door before six because he's up anyway.

I was a hundred and forty-five pounds until I turned fifty. I'm two hundred and nine now. My A1C is 6.0, down from 7.3 in 2019, and the doctor at Kaiser says that's a good number for a man who sits down to a full dinner at seven every night. Nelson cooks with more oil than my mother ever did.

We put the fence in together in 2004. It came to twenty-eight hundred for the cedar and I paid sixteen eighty of it, because the rotten run was on my side and he wouldn't hear about splitting it even. He bought the gate and the hinges out of his own pocket and cut the opening himself, on a Thursday, and then we ate at seven.

The four of us went over to Toisan, eleven or twelve, I'd have to look it up. His village and my mother's village are about forty minutes apart on the new road. He put all four tickets on his card for the miles and I paid him back for ours. I paid the hotel in Taishan and the driver for the week and we split the food, and the last two days he wouldn't take anything for the driver at all. The mothers were told that the two of us sharing a room was cheaper.

There's a picture from that trip on the shelf in the front room, the mothers sitting down in front of us and the two of us standing behind them outside the hall. She picks that one up when she dusts.

My daughter Vivian is at Davis, animal science, third year. She's called him Uncle Nelson since she could talk, the same way she calls my actual brother Uncle Gordon, and she likes Nelson better, which isn't a hard contest to win.

Her brakes went out in Woodland in February and she texted him and not me. He drove up and paid for it at a place on East Street and then he wouldn't take the four hundred back, so I bought his tires in May.

When she was nineteen I was driving her back up on a Sunday and somewhere past Vacaville she asked me if Uncle Nelson was going to move in when Ma Ma passes. I said he's got his own house and it's paid off, he's not leaving it. She said okay and put her feet up on the dash. She didn't ask me anything else.

Gordon stayed for dinner that Saturday in July. Nelson came through the gate at ten to seven with a bag of gai lan and put it in the sink, and he went into the second drawer for the peeler without looking at the drawer. Then Gordon talked about his boat for the rest of the meal. He keeps it on the delta and he'll tell you what he pays for the slip.

What he wants is both our names on the deed, and then it gets sold when the time comes and split. He isn't wrong about any of it. The appointment with the lawyer on Fourteenth Street is the twenty-second and I haven't mentioned it to anybody.

My mother is eighty-six. She's never once asked me a question about him. She saves him the cheek of the fish. When she was admitted in March the form wanted two numbers and she gave them mine and then his, and the woman at the desk asked what the relation was, and my mother said neighbor and spelled the last name out for her.

A woman at the Hayward account tried to set me up with her cousin a few years back and got upset with me when I said no. She said a man my age shouldn't be by himself. I told her I'm not really by myself.

Somebody got into three cars on our block in August and a house one street over, so I had the locks changed, front and back, a hundred and ninety with the trip charge. The locksmith asked how many copies and I said three. He cut three and put them in a little paper envelope. He asked if I wanted them on rings and I said no.