“This is garbage.” That’s what my sister once said about my novel. Yet three days after skipping my 30th birthday celebration, she came asking me to help get her own book published. She wanted my literary agent’s number and recommendation. I’d already seen the agent’s rejection.
My sister Meredith stood in my kitchen wearing expensive sunglasses and holding a leather folder against her chest.
Behind her were my parents.
Dad had his arms crossed. Mom was looking around the room as though searching for something she could criticize without starting an argument.
Nobody mentioned my birthday.
Nobody apologized for the forty plates of food I’d purchased, the hall I’d decorated, or the thirty-eight empty chairs that had waited for people who had promised to come.
Instead, Meredith removed her sunglasses, placed them on my kitchen counter, and smiled.
“Devon, I need you to do something for me.”
I looked at her.
“What?”
She opened the folder.
Inside was a manuscript.
A thick stack of printed pages held together with a large black clip.
“My novel is finally ready for representation,” she announced. “You’ve already got an agent in New York, so obviously you can introduce me.”
I glanced at the title page.
The manuscript was called The Orchard House.
Meredith had been working on some version of it for eleven years.
At every Christmas dinner, every family cookout, and every Sunday supper, she’d explained that the opening chapter still needed refining.
Now, suddenly, she wanted me to help her get published.
I looked toward the envelope resting beside my laptop.
Inside was a printed email from my literary agent, Margo Ellis.
Meredith had contacted her weeks earlier.
She’d claimed she was my first editor.
She’d told Margo she had taught me everything I knew about writing.
And Margo had already declined to represent her manuscript.
My sister didn’t know I’d seen the exchange.
Dad leaned against the refrigerator.
“Come on, son. You know how much this means to Meredith.”
I looked toward him.
For a moment, I remembered the empty hall.
The untouched barbecue.
The paper birthday decorations.
Then I asked my sister one question.
“Why would you need me to recommend your work when you’ve already told my agent you were the person who taught me how to write?”
Meredith’s smile disappeared.
For the first time since she’d entered my house, she had absolutely nothing to say.
My name is Devon Sloan.
I’m thirty years old, and I’ve worked as a journeyman lineman for the electric cooperative outside Joplin, Missouri, for nine years.
Most mornings, I’m at the yard before seven, checking equipment and preparing for whatever the day might bring.
Sometimes that means routine maintenance.
Sometimes it means replacing aging hardware or working with a crew to restore service after severe weather.
I like the work.
I like being able to look down a road after a long shift and see porch lights shining where they’d been dark when we arrived.
There’s a satisfaction in that.
A real, practical kind of satisfaction that doesn’t require anyone to applaud.
But I’ve also been writing stories since I was eight.
For most of my life, nobody in my family took that part of me seriously.
My father, Kent, worked at a trucking terminal for thirty years. My mother, Becky, handled bookkeeping for a dental office.
We lived in a modest house on the north side of Joplin, with a narrow backyard and a kitchen table where almost every family argument began.
Mom and Dad weren’t interested in books.
Not especially.
Dad read the sports page and occasionally a fishing magazine. Mom liked crossword puzzles and recipes.
But my older sister, Meredith, loved talking about literature.
She was three years older than me, and from the time we were little, everybody called her the smart one.
She read thick novels with complicated covers.
Used words I’d never heard before.
And carried a notebook everywhere, as though inspiration might arrive while she was waiting in line at the grocery store.
I admired her.
I thought she knew everything worth knowing about stories.
So when I began writing, she was the person I wanted to impress.
The first story I remember showing her was about a talking tractor.
I was eight.
I’d written six pages in crooked pencil on lined notebook paper.
The tractor could talk because a lonely farmer needed someone to listen to him.
I thought that was an excellent idea.
Meredith read the first paragraph while standing beside her bedroom door.
Then she handed the pages back.
“Tractors don’t have mouths, Devon.”
I stared at her.
“I know. That’s why it’s pretend.”
She laughed.
“That doesn’t make it good.”
I took the pages to my room.
For a while, I felt embarrassed.
Then I decided the tractor needed a better explanation.
I added a scene involving a mysterious mechanic and tried again.
Meredith crossed out three paragraphs with a red pen.
At the top, she wrote one word.
BORING.
That became our routine.
I’d write something.
Then, because she was my older sister and I still believed she wanted to help, I’d show it to her.
She would return it covered in red marks.
Sometimes the notes were useful.
Most weren’t.
“Too slow.”
“Nobody cares.”
“Why would anyone read this?”
Once, she wrote GARBAGE across the top of a story about a little boy trying to find his missing dog.
I can still remember how the red ink pressed through the paper.
That story mattered to me more than anything I’d written before.
I was eleven.
Grandpa had a beagle named Rufus, a dog with enormous ears and a habit of wandering away whenever he smelled something interesting.
One summer, Rufus disappeared during a thunderstorm.
Grandpa and I searched the yard, the orchard behind his house, and the neighboring fields.
Eventually, we found the dog sheltering beneath an old porch.
I wrote a story inspired by that afternoon.
It wasn’t exactly what happened.
I added details, changed the weather, and made the boy in the story braver than I remembered being.
I worked on it for nearly two weeks, mostly at night with a flashlight beneath my blanket.
I used a green spiral notebook.
On the front, I wrote:
THE STORM AND RUFUS.
When I finished, I gave it to Meredith.
She kept it for four days.
That was longer than usual.
I remember being excited because I thought she’d finally found something worth taking seriously.
Then she returned it.
Every page was covered in red.
Sentences crossed out.
Words changed.
Paragraphs moved.
At the top of the first page, she’d written GARBAGE so firmly that the letters had left marks on the next sheet.
She stood beside my bed and told me the story wasn’t interesting.
“Nothing really happens, Devon. A dog gets lost, and then somebody finds it.”
I looked at her.
“That’s what the story’s about.”
She sighed.
“You write like you’re eleven.”
I stared.
“I am eleven.”
She laughed.
“Exactly.”
Then she went back to her room.
I closed the notebook.
Placed it in a cardboard box beneath my bed.
And stopped showing Meredith my writing.
That spring, she won the county library’s young writers competition.
She was fourteen.
The prize included a savings bond, a certificate, and publication in a small anthology of local student writing.
The Joplin newspaper ran her photograph.
She stood outside the library wearing a blue dress, holding her certificate and smiling proudly.
Mom bought a frame that afternoon.
The clipping went into our hallway.
LOCAL GIRL WINS COUNTY WRITING PRIZE.
For years afterward, visitors would stop and admire it.
Mom would explain how Meredith had always been gifted with words.
Dad would tell people she was going to become a famous novelist someday.
I asked Meredith if I could read the winning story.
She told me it was too complicated for me.
Mom said it was a sophisticated story about a storm.
I was eleven, disappointed with my own writing, and increasingly convinced Meredith understood literature in a way I never would.
So I didn’t ask again.
That photograph stayed on our hallway wall for almost two decades.
I walked past it hundreds of times.
Never knowing what it really represented.
As we grew older, the roles in our family became fixed.
Meredith was the writer.
I was the practical one.
The boy who could repair a bicycle, replace a light fixture under appropriate supervision, and figure out why the lawn mower wouldn’t start.
Meredith earned an English degree.
Then a master’s degree.
She eventually began teaching introductory writing courses part-time at the community college.
At family dinners, Dad would ask about her novel.
She’d sigh thoughtfully and explain that she was revising the opening.
She’d been revising it for years.
Nobody questioned that.
Real literature took time, according to Meredith.
I kept writing, too.
I simply did it privately.
During high school, I filled algebra notebooks with scenes and dialogue.
When I began training as a lineman, I wrote during lunch breaks.
After earning my journeyman credentials, I bought a cheap laptop and worked on stories late at night.
By twenty-seven, I’d finished four novels.
None had been published.
Nobody in my family had read them.
Sometimes I opened an old file, read a few pages, and heard Meredith’s voice.
Garbage.