“Sit,” Tony said, waving a pair of tongs at a deck chair.

Tom sat and watched his brother paint red sauce over steaks. Tony was five years older than Tom, balding but trim, the creases around his eyes defined more by exercise and sunshine than by age. It would be hard, Tom thought, to guess which of us is older.

It was Tony who had come roaring out to Seattle like an angry guardian angel—six months after Barbara moved out; five months after Tom left his job at Aerotech; three months after Tom stopped answering his phone. Tony had cleared the apartment of empty bottles and frozen food wrappers, switched off the TV that had flickered and mumbled for weeks uninterrupted, scolded Tom into showering and shaving—talked him into the move back to Belltower and the job at the car lot.

It was also Tony who had offered, as consolation for the loss of Barbara, the observation “She’s a bitch, little brother. They’re all bitches. Fuck em.”

“She’s not a bitch,” Tom had said.

“They’re all bitches.”

“Don’t call her that,” Tom had said, and he remembered Tony’s look, the arrogance eroding into uncertainty.

“Well … you can’t throw your life away for her, anyhow. There are people out there going on with their business —people with cancer, people whose kids were smeared over the highway by semi trucks. If they can deal with it, you can fucking well deal with it.”

This was both unanswerable and true. Tom accepted the chastisement and had been clinging to it since. Barbara would not have approved; she disliked the appropriation of public grief for private purposes. Tom was more pragmatic. You do what you have to.

But here he was in Tony’s big house beside the bay, and it occurred to him that he was carrying a considerable load of guilt, gratitude, and resentment, mostly directed at his brother.