Chapter 1 — Three Car Seats

They were six months old. Three of them.

Three car seats lined up on my doormat in the gray morning light, one diaper bag slumped between them, and a single note — scribbled, of all places, across the back of a gas-station receipt.

I’m sorry, Abel. I can’t do this.

That was it.

That was the whole of what my brother left me, the sum total of his goodbye: seven words in ballpoint pen on a receipt for eleven gallons of regular, and three sleeping babies who did not yet know that the two people who were supposed to raise them were both, in their different ways, already gone.

Their mother had died eleven days earlier.

I never got the full story — a complication, something sudden, one of those quiet catastrophes that rearranges a family in an afternoon.

My brother had lasted less than two weeks after that.

I don’t say it to condemn him; I have had twenty-two years to think about it and I have mostly stopped trying.

Some people break under a weight and some people carry it, and you often cannot tell in advance which kind a person is, sometimes not even the person himself.

My brother turned out to be the kind who broke.