“She has a dog.”

“What kind of dog?”

“I don’t know.” Daniel felt his impatience growing. He fought it and failed. “A dog,” he said sharply. “Maybe a big dog. Maybe a take-a-bite-out-of-your-ass dog.”

Daniel instantly regretted raising his voice. It wasn’t Beau’s fault that the town of Egypt had hired some whacko to come and read tealeaves.

Beau was easy-going, but he knew when he wasn’t being treated fairly.

Daniel had been told that, even as a baby, Beau had been good-natured. That he hardly ever cried and hardly ever stopped smiling. Daniel wouldn’t know, because Beau was two years older.

Beau was a little slow. He’d come into the world in the front seat of their parents’ car, and had been deprived of oxygen for several minutes. Funny thing was, Beau didn’t consider himself cheated in any way. No, he was one of the happiest, most content people Daniel had ever known. And wasn’t that what life was all about, if not happiness, then at least contentment?

Daniel thought it would be easy, moving back from LA, but living in Missouri was just a different kind of hard. As a kid, Daniel had pored over travel books. He’d soaked in everything he could about places he feared he might never see. Sometimes he thought that if he hadn’t read those books, he’d be like everybody else in Egypt -complacent, almost smug in that complacency. The people in Egypt didn’t think about what was going on in the rest of the world, what they might be missing.

People were always reaching for more. Maybe the secret was to reach for less.

Daniel watched as, wordlessly, Beau plopped down on the couch, picked up the remote control, and clicked on the television. He was pissed.

“I’ll see you later, okay?” Daniel said, needing to reassure himself as well as Beau.

No answer. Beau didn’t take his eyes from the TV screen.

“Tonight we’ll cook those steaks I picked up yesterday.” How had things gotten like this, Daniel wondered in frustration. He wanted to be Beau’s friend, his brother, not his parent. The enormous responsibility was turning him into some grumpy-assed old man, somebody he didn’t like, somebody he wouldn’t want to hang around with.