Our parents were the only other witnesses to our childhood, and they were gone, and that left Terry as the sole surviving keeper of the first eighteen years of my life, as I was of his.

Nine years of estrangement, I realized, wrapping the windmill plates, had not only cost me a brother in the present.

It had put at risk the entire shared past, because a memory only half-remembered by one person is a memory dying, and there were a thousand of them — the treehouse, the Sunday drives, our father’s singing — that only the two of us still held, and that would vanish from the world entirely if we did not, at some point, sit down together and remember them out loud while there was still someone to remember them with.

That derby car in Terry’s hand was not just a toy.