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acts.
    “Mort was never a big fan of ritual ...,” Boner says.
    “Will you look at that,” Wendy says, elbowing me in the ribs. I follow her gaze across the cemetery to the access road, where a black Porsche has noisily pulled up. And for a moment, I don’t recognize him, this man attempting to knot his tie while running across the wet lawn in his rumpled suit pants and motorcycle jacket like he’s finishing a marathon. And then I do, from the way he runs shamelessly toward us, without the slightest hint of decorum. He is wearing moccasins, of all things.
    “Phillip,” my mother says softly, and signals Boner to stop. By this point Phillip’s given up on the tie, which he leaves hanging unknotted around his neck. He comes running down the lawn and then slides the last few feet, like we used to do on the slight slope of our front lawn when it rained, coming to a stop right in front of my mother.
    “Mom,” he says, and throws his wet arms around her.
    “You came,” she says, overjoyed. Phillip is her baby, and he’s spent his life reeling in the slack as fast as she can cut it for him.
    “Of course I came,” he says. He pulls back and looks up at me.
    “Judd.”
    “Hi, Phillip.”
    He grabs my arm and pulls me into a dramatic hug. Phillip, my baby brother, who used to climb into bed with me, smelling of lavender baby shampoo, and press his smooth, rounded cheek against mine, gently pulling at my arm hairs as I told him stories. He loved to guess the morals of Aesop’s fables. Now he smells of cigarettes and mouthwash, and he’s put on a good ten pounds or so since I last saw him, most of it in his face. I feel the familiar wave of loss and regret that always seems to accompany our infrequent reunions. I’d give anything for him to be fi ve again, happy and unbroken.
    He reaches past me to shake hands with Paul, who reciprocates quickly and self-consciously, trying to speed things along and get the funeral back on track. Phillip kisses Wendy’s cheek.
    “You got fat,” she whispers.
    “You got old,” he responds in a stage whisper, loud enough for everyone to hear. Behind him, Boner clears his throat. Phillip turns around and straightens his jacket. “Sorry, Boner. Please continue.” Wendy hits the back of his head. “Charlie! Sorry. Rabbi Grodner,” he says quickly, but the chuckles have already rippled through the crowd and Boner looks momentarily homicidal.
    “Before I call on Mort’s eldest son, Paul, to remember his father for us, I’d like to read a short psalm...”
    “I shouldn’t have called him that,” Phillip whispers to me, eyes wide.
    “Damn.”
    “It was an honest mistake.”
    “It was disrespectful.”
    I am tempted to point out that showing up a half hour late to his father’s funeral might also be construed as disrespectful, but it would be pointless. Phillip has always been happily impervious to advice and criticism.
    “Be quiet!” Paul hisses at us. Phillip winks at me. And here we stand at our father’s grave, the three Foxman men, all roughed from the same template but put through different finishing processes. We each have our father’s dark curly hair and square, dimpled chin, but there would be no mistaking us for twins. Paul looks like me, only bigger, broader, and angrier; me on steroids. Phillip looks like me, only slimmer and much better-looking, his features rendered more gracefully, his smile wide and effortlessly seductive.
    When Boner finishes reading his psalm, Paul steps up to deliver what is meant to be a eulogy but instead seems to be an acceptance speech for the Most Dedicated Son award. He thanks Dad for teaching him how to run the business; he thanks his wife, Alice, for taking a leave of absence from her job as a dental hygienist to help out at the stores when Dad fell ill, he thanks Mom for taking care of Dad, and then he talks at length about what it was like working with his father, running Foxman Sporting Goods, the Hudson Valley’s premiere