I did not need to hear the terms.

There were no terms under which the answer was anything but yes.

My brother’s children needed a home, and I had one, and I had a debt three years deep, and I was going to spend the rest of my life paying it down.

Chapter 2 — Three Years

I need to tell you about the three years, because they are the part I have to live with, and because you cannot understand what came after without understanding how a decent man talks himself into standing by while something goes wrong.

My brother Russ died at thirty-five.

A heart attack, out of nowhere, on an ordinary afternoon — he was thirty-five and built like an ox and gone before the ambulance reached him, and it broke something in our whole family that has never quite set right.

Ollie was three then.

Josie was a baby.

Russ’s wife, Darla, wept at the funeral and said all the things you say, that she’d keep his memory alive, that the kids would always know their father, and I believed her, because why on earth wouldn’t I.

For a while after, I came around the way you do — I brought groceries, I fixed things, I asked to take Ollie to the park.

And slowly, so slowly I never saw the pattern until it was three years long, the door closed.

The kids were napping.

The kids were sick.