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but sexy). When we pulled into my driveway, he’d tried to kiss me. I remember that he had the heat cranking in his car, that Van Halen was playing on the radio, that he exuded a kind of desperate sexual energy and wore way too much cologne. Polo, I think. It wasn’t a scary situation, and although I wasn’t “into him,” as we too-cool adolescents used to say, I was flattered and could barely wait to get out of the car and call my friends.
    When I entered the house, my parents were sitting at the kitchen table looking grim. My father held a cup of coffee in his hands and my mother looked as if she’d been crying. It was a bit too early for my father to be home and dinner should have been cooking but the kitchen was cold.
    “Oh, Ridley,” my mother said, as if she’d forgotten I was expected home. “What time is it?” My mother was a little bird of a woman, really tiny with small, refined features and lustrous auburn hair. She moved with the grace of a dancer and carried those faded aspirations in her impeccably held posture and jutted chin. She looked ten years younger than the other mothers I knew, though she was actually older than most of them.
    “Go on upstairs for a while, will you, lullaby?” said my father, getting up. “We’ll get you some dinner in just a bit.” He was moving into what we would later call his Ernest Hemingway stage, without the drinking. He had a full graying beard and a slight (getting less slight) belly. He stood just over six feet tall and had powerful arms and big hands. He had a way of hugging me that made every childish worry disappear. But he didn’t hug me then, just put a hand on my shoulder and ushered me toward the stairs.
    When I’d entered and saw them sitting there, I figured I was in some kind of trouble for being in the car with Frank Alvarez, but I realized quickly that they were too upset for a small transgression like the one I’d committed.
    “What’s going on?” I asked.
    Before my father could answer, Ace was thundering down the stairs, a large backpack over his shoulder.
    My brother and I were raised in the same house by the same parents and still managed to have completely different childhoods. He is older than I am by three years. He was willful where I was yielding; rebellious where I was obedient; sad, angry where I was happy. For the longest time he was to me the very embodiment of coolness. He was movie-star handsome with jet-black hair and ice-blue eyes, defined muscles and chiseled jaw. All my friends were in love with him, and if you’d told me he got up five minutes before me and put the sun in the sky, I’d have believed you.
    “Where are you going?” I asked him, because more than just the backpack, he had a nearly palpable aura of leaving and not coming back. He’d threatened this a million times, and every time he and my parents fought, I felt a nausea that he’d make good on it. Fear and sadness opened in my belly as he pushed passed me.
    “The fuck out of here,” he said, looking at my father.
    “Ridley,” my mother said. “Go upstairs.” I heard a kind of desperation in her tone. I headed up slowly, lingering with my hand on the banister and looking at these three people whom I loved, so sad and angry at one another that they were barely recognizable. They all looked gray, faces stiff as stones.
    I couldn’t remember a peaceful moment between Ace and my father. When they were in a room together, it was only a matter of time before an argument erupted, and it had been getting worse in the months before Ace left.
    “You’re not going anywhere, son,” said my father. “We’re getting you help.”
    “I don’t want your help. It’s too late. And you’re
not
my father, so don’t call me son.”
    “Don’t talk like that, Ace,” said my mother, but her voice was small and her eyes filled with tears.
    “Ridley,” my father roared. “Get upstairs.”
    I ran, my heart beating in my chest like a drum. I lay on my