FEW MINUTES LATER I HAD POURED THE COFFEE INTO mugs and set them on a tray with the sugar bowl and two spoons. I carried it carefully to the doorway into the living room, and stopped dead. The picture I saw was one of domestic bliss, charming in every aspect—except for the fact that it did not include me. My brother had settled onto the couch with Rita as if he had always lived there. Cody and Astor stood a few feet away looking at him with fascination, and I froze in the kitchen door and stared at the tableau with a growing sense of discomfort. Seeing Brian here, on my couch, Rita leaning toward him as she spoke, and Cody and Astor watching—it was just too weirdly surreal. The images did not quite mesh, but they were very unsettling, as if you had entered a cathedral for high mass and found people copulating on the altar.

Brian, of course, seemed completely undisturbed. I suppose it is one of the great advantages of being incapable of feeling things; he looked as comfortable on my couch as if he had grown there. And just to emphasize the fact that he apparently belonged there more than I did, he saw me lurking with the coffee and waved a hand at the chair next to the couch.

“Sit down, brother,” he said. “Make yourself at home.” Rita jerked upright, and Cody and Astor swung their heads to me and watched as I approached with the coffee.

“Oh!” Rita said, and to me she sounded a little guilty. “You forgot the cream, Dexter.” And before anyone could speak she was gone into the kitchen.

“You keep calling him brother,” Astor said to Brian. “How come you don’t use his name?”

Brian blinked at her, and I felt a surge of kinship. It wasn’t just me—Astor had reduced him to mere eye movements, too. “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose it’s because the relationship is such a surprise to both of us.”

Cody and Astor swung their heads to face me in perfect unison.

“Yes,” I said, and it was very true. “A complete surprise.”

“Why?” Astor said. “Lots of people have brothers.”

I had no idea how to explain, and I stalled by putting down the tray and sinking into the chair. And once again it was Brian and not me who jumped into the silence.

“Lots of people have families, too,” he said. “Like you two. But brother—Dexter and I did not. We were, ah, abandoned. Under very unpleasant circumstances.” He gave her the bright smile again, and I am quite sure I only imagined that there was some real glint behind it this time. “Especially me.”

“What does that mean?” Astor said.

“I was an orphan,” Brian said. “A foster child. I grew up in a whole bunch of different homes where they didn’t like me and didn’t really want me, but they were paid to keep me.”

“Dexter had a home,” Astor said.

Brian nodded. “Yes, he did. And he has another one now.”

I felt cold talons on my back and did not know why. Surely there was no threat in Brian’s words, but still—

“You two need to realize how very lucky you have been,” Brian said. “To have a home—and even somebody who understands you.” He looked at me and smiled again. “And now, two somebodies.” And he gave them a horrible fake wink.

“Does that mean you’re going to hang around with us?” Astor said.

Brian’s smile grew a fraction. “I just might,” he said. “What else is family for?”

Brian’s words jerked me into action, and I leaned toward him as if somebody had burned me on the back. “Are you sure?” I said, and I felt the words turn into cold and clumsy lumps in my mouth. Nonetheless, I stammered on. “I mean, you know, um, it’s wonderful to see you and all, but—there’s a certain amount of risk involved.”

“What risk?” Astor demanded.

“I can be very careful,” Brian said to me, “as we both know.”

“It’s just, you know, Deborah might come around here,” I said.

“She hasn’t come around for the last two weeks,” he said. And he raised a mocking eyebrow at me. “Has she?”

“How do you know that?” Astor said. “Why does it matter if Aunt Deborah comes around?”

It was very interesting to hear that “two weeks,” and know exactly how long Brian had been watching us, and we both ignored Astor’s interruption because it quite clearly mattered a great deal. If Deborah were to see Brian here, we would both be in unspeakably hot water. But what Brian said was true: Deborah did not come around very often lately. I hadn’t really thought about why that might be, but perhaps in light of her recent meltdown on the subject of my having a family before she did, I could assume that she found it painful in some way.

Luckily for me, I was spared another lesson in family dynamics, as Rita came bustling in bearing a small milk pitcher, and even a plate of cookies. “There,” she said, putting down her load and arranging things in a more perfect display. After all, she was Rita the Mighty, absolute Ruler of the Domestic and All Things Kitchen. “We had some of that Jamaican blend left that you said was so good, Dexter. Did you use that?” I nodded mutely as she moved things around on the coffee table. “Because after all, you liked it so much, maybe your brother would like it, too.” And she loaded the word “brother” with so much extra weight that I was very sure I had not heard the last of it.

“It smells absolutely wonderful,” Brian said. “I can already feel myself perking up.”

Brian’s words were so patently fake that I was sure Rita would turn on him with a raised eyebrow and a curled lip. Instead, she actually blushed a little as she sank back onto the couch and pushed a cup toward him. “Do you take milk and sugar?” she said.

“Oh, no,” Brian said, smiling right at me. “I like it very dark.”

Rita turned the cup’s handle toward him and placed a small napkin beside it. “Dexter likes a little sugar,” she said.

“Dear lady,” Brian gushed, “I would say he’s found it.”

I don’t know what terrible suffering had turned Brian into the Fountain of Phoniness I now saw sitting on my couch, but I can only believe it was a very good thing that he was incapable of feeling shame. I have always prided myself on being smooth and somewhat plausible; he clearly never learned either. His compliments were coarse, obvious, and quite clearly fake. And as the evening went on—through more coffee, then a pizza, because naturally my brother had to stay for dinner—he heaped it on higher and deeper. I kept waiting for the heavens to open up and shatter him with lightning, or at least for some great voice to urge him to put a sock on it, as Harry would have said. But the more outrageous Brian’s flattery and flummery got, the happier it made Rita. Even Cody and Astor simply watched him in an admiring silence.

And to cap off my discomfort, when Lily Anne began to fuss in the next room, Rita brought her into the living room and put her on display. Brian obliged with the most exorbitant display yet, praising her toes, her nose, her tiny perfect fingers, and even the way she cried. And Rita absolutely ate it up, smiling, nodding, and even unbuttoning her shirt to feed Lily Anne right there in front of us all.

Altogether, it was one of the most uncomfortable evenings I had spent since—well, quite honestly, since the last time I had seen Brian. It was all made worse because there was truly nothing I could say or do—and this was partly because I did not know what I found objectionable. After all, as Rita took such pleasure in saying at least three times, we were all family. Why shouldn’t we sit around together and trade cheerful lies? Isn’t that what families do?

When Brian finally got up to go at around nine o’clock, Rita and the kids were all thrilled with their new relative, Uncle Brian. Their old relative—battered and anxious Daddy Dexter—was apparently the only one who felt nervous, uneasy, and uncertain. I walked Brian to the front door, where Rita gave him a large hug and told him to please come around as often as possible, and Cody and Astor both shook his hand in what must be described as a fawning manner.

Of course I’d had no chance at all to speak with Brian privately, since he had been surrounded by the admiring crowd all night. So I took the chance to walk him out to his car, firmly closing the door on his groupies. And just before he climbed into the little red car, he turned and looked at me.

“What a lovely family you have, brother,” he said. “Domestic perfection.”

“I still don’t know why you’re here,” I said.

“Don’t you?” Brian said. “Wasn’t I obvious?”

“Painfully obvious,” I said. “But not at all clear.”

“Is it so hard to believe that I want to belong to a family?” he said.

“Yes.”

He cocked his head to the side and looked at me with perfect emptiness. “But isn’t that what brought us together the first time?” he said. “Isn’t it completely natural?”

“It might be,” I said. “But we’re not.”

“Alas, too true,” he said with his usual melodramatic flair. “But nevertheless, I found myself thinking about it. About you. My only blood relative.”

“As far as we know,” I said, and to my surprise I heard him say the same words at the same time, and he smiled broadly as he realized it, too.

“You see?” he said. “You can’t argue with DNA. We are stuck with each other, brother. We’re family.”

And even though the same thought had been repeated endlessly all evening, and even though it was still ringing in my ears as Brian drove away, it did nothing to reassure me, and I went to bed still feeling the slow creep of uneasy toes along my spine.