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dosage.”
    “Generally speaking, half a bottle is too much.”
    “Let it go, Claire. You’re worse than Mom. You guys have created this whole myth of my attempted suicide. It wasn’t like that. Trust me. I was there.”
    “Maybe you were there, but you didn’t have to watch the cops kick down your front door and pull you out of the tub. You were too busy going into cardiac arrest.”
    “Enough, Claire.”
    “You were fucking blue!”
    “It was an accident.”
    She looks away, shaking her head in frustration. The truth is I don’t even remember that night. The booze and sleeping pills had scrambled my brain and I woke up in the hospital, strangely euphoric and unable to remember what month it was.
    “We’ll have to agree to disagree,” Claire says, shaking it off. She can do that, change moods like taking off a hat.
    “I’ll get a new phone,” I say, which is the closest thing to a concession I’m going to make on the subject.
    “Way ahead of you, little brother.” She reaches into her bag and tosses me a colorful box. “It’s got a camera and plays movies and picks up your dry cleaning for all I know, and I’m not leaving until you activate it.”
    “Thanks.”
    “And no throwing this one. It cost like five hundred bucks.”
    “Deal.”
    Having tended to business, she bends over to kiss my cheek. “What’s new and exciting in the grief racket?”
    “Same old same old.”
    “Your last column made me cry.”
    “Sorry.”
    “No. It was great. Mom’s got it on the fridge.”
    I smile. “Wow. I finally made it back to the fridge.”
    It was our mother’s strict policy that only A-plus work was displayed on her stainless-steel Subzero refrigerator. Growing up, Claire’s and Debbie’s schoolwork was always plastered all over it, but once I’d moved beyond first-grade spelling tests, I never made it back up there again.
    “I guess you get an A in being sad and lonely.”
    “Top of my class.”
    She gives me a fond smile and grabs me by the hair to look down at me. There are faint creases at the corners of her eyes that I never noticed before. You see the people you love the way they are in your head, but every once in a while you accidentally catch a glimpse of them in real time, and in those split seconds, as your brain scrambles to adjust to the new reality, small things inside you swerve off the road and drive over cliffs, spinning and screaming all the way down.
    “We’re getting older,” I say.
    “Fuck you. I am not.” Her eyes narrow into slits. “Hey,” she says. “You have the look of someone who’s been freshly fucked.”
    “What?”
    “My twin telepathy is telling me that you went ahead and bagged the meatloaf babe.”
    “We don’t have twin telepathy.”
    “Of course we do, it’s just subtle, like … flesh-colored nail polish.”
    I grin. “Like … central air.”
    “Like … a white wine buzz.”
    “Like … Mel Gibson’s Australian accent in
Lethal Weapon
.”
    She laughs and then stoops to lower her face directly in front of mine, staring at me nose to nose until I look away. She’s the lone person I can look in the eye these days, but even so, in twenty-nine years, I’ve never outstared her.
    “Oh shit, you really did!” she shouts gleefully. “No wonder I couldn’t get you on the phone. You were boning the horny hausfrau!”
    “Keep it down, will you?” I say, looking around the street.
    But Claire’s enjoying this too much. “Dougie, you slut!”
    I lean back on the porch swing, shaking my head. “What gave it away?”
    “Elementary, little brother,” she says, sitting down next to me. “There’s lipstick on your ear, your T-shirt is on inside out, and you’ve got a world-class case of bed head.”
    “Come on,” I say skeptically. “I always look like this.”
    “Well, then, I guess you’ll have to reconsider the twin telepathy thing.” She grabs some Cap’n Crunch from my box and starts shoveling it into her mouth. “You and the