He put three car seats on my step before dawn, and he drove away on the last of that eleven gallons of gas, and I did not see him again.

I have wondered, over the years, what that morning was like from his side of it — the drive to my building in the dark, the three car seats to unbuckle and carry up and set down, one at a time, on a doormat above a hardware store.

It would have been so much easier to simply not do it, to keep driving, to leave them somewhere anonymous or to leave them nowhere at all.

He did not do the easy thing.

In the middle of whatever was breaking in him, he did the one hard, decent thing still within his reach: he brought them to the one person he could think of who might stay when he could not.

I have spent a long time being angry at my brother, and a longer time trying not to be, and where I have finally landed is something like this — that a man can love his children and still be unable to raise them, and that leaving them with me may have been the most loving thing he had left in him to do.