“Brothers from another mother?” I suggested in response to the question, then opened the beer and walked out to stand with him on the patio.

“That w-wasn’t the phrase I was thinking of, Max,” he said, his smiling dark eyes now holding mine.

Billy has a profound stutter when he talks with anyone face-to-face. Behind a wall, on a phone, or simply out of sight, his speech is smooth, erudite, and flawless. But put a face in front of him, and a switch turns somewhere in his brain. Notice I do not say he suffers from a stuttering problem, because no one who is familiar with Billy and his abilities and success would call him a sufferer or victim.

Billy and I are from the City of Brotherly Love, but the neighborhoods we grew up in were different worlds. I was a third-generation cop from South Philadelphia, a son who was spoon-fed on the ethnic soup of Italians and Poles and Greeks and any other white European immigrant society that could trace its American heritage back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yeah, Independence Hall harbored the breakaway English in 1776, but South Philly was home to the stevedores, brick masons, butchers, carpenters, and backbreaking, hard-drinking workers who made the whole new national machine churn.

And yes, Billy’s family might well trace its roots back to the slave ships from Africa and the human marketplace where they were sold only a few blocks east and south of where the Liberty Bell once hung. But in our half of the twenty-first century, most blacks had migrated to the north and west sides of the city. And in Billy’s neighborhood near Twelfth and Indiana, all the scourges of poverty, drugs, unemployment, and crime were rampant in the 1970s and 1980s. Somehow our mothers met in a church, both of them fleeing religious tradition and abusive husbands. A friendship was born. Billy finally escaped by using his intelligence and drive to get a law degree at Temple University, and a business degree at Wharton. Then he pledged to never live out of the sunshine again.