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minutes later. There was a tub of vanilla in the freezer and I was just barely able to scrape out enough for one small serving, which was fine, because I didn’t have much of an appetite.
    I should have known better than to think I could reason things out with Thomas about how he spent his days. My parents had tried for years without success. I was a fool to think I could accomplish anything different. My brother was who he was. He’d always been this way and there was every reason to believe he always would.
    The signs came early. At least some of them. The fascination with maps revealed itself when he was around six. At the time, my parents thought it was pretty cool. When guests came over they’d show off Thomas the way parents of a child piano prodigy would make him play something by Brahms. “Pick a country,” Dad would say to visitors. “Any country.”
    My parents’ friends, not really sure what it was Thomas did, would finally come up with one. “Argentina,” they might say.And then Thomas, a pencil and notepad in hand, would sketch out the country. Add some dots for cities and label them. Write in the names of neighboring nations. Then he’d hand it over for perusal.
    The thing was, our visitors generally didn’t know Argentina from Arkansas, and didn’t have a clue whether the map they’d been handed was accurate, so Dad would pull an atlas off the shelf, open it to Argentina, and say, “Look at that! Will ya look at that? Can you believe it? He even got the city of Mendoza in just the right spot. Kid’s going to be a cartographer or something, I guarantee it.”
    If Thomas minded being offered up as a parlor trick, he never voiced an objection. At the time, he just seemed like a very gifted baby brother. Somewhat withdrawn, shy, but no indication that he was troubled in any serious way.
    That would come soon enough.
    My parents were proud as could be of him. Me, not so much. At least not on family vacations, when Mom would pack everyone’s bag and Dad would load them into the trunk and we’d hit the road for Atlantic City or Florida or Boston. Mom had no sense of direction and had a terrible time reading the road maps the gas stations gave out, although she was a genius at folding them back up perfectly.
    So Dad would read the map. When people today talk about the dangers of sending text messages while driving, I want to laugh. My father, had there been smartphones back then, could have tapped out Moby Dick while navigating the Buffalo bypass. He’d have Mom fold the map to a manageable size, drape it over the top of the steering wheel, and glance down every couple of seconds as we roamed across America.
    Until Thomas got to be seven.
    “I’ll read the map, Dad,” he offered.
    Dad ignored him at first, but Thomas persisted. Finally Dadfigured, what the hell, let the kid think he was being useful. But Thomas wasn’t playing some game. He wasn’t pretending to navigate, the way some children, long before they know how to read, will rhyme off words when they open the pages of a book.
    Thomas only had to glance at it for a few seconds before he said something like, “Just stay on 90 for another ten miles, then get off and go east on 22.”
    “Let me have a look at that,” Dad said, taking the map back and studying it over the steering wheel.
    “I’ll be damned,” he said. “The kid’s right.”
    Thomas was always right when it came to reading maps.
    I’d try to snatch them from him, figuring that, as the elder sibling, I should be the navigator. It tore me apart to see my father consulting my baby brother for assistance.
    “Raymond!” my father would shout at me. “Leave your damn brother alone and let him do his job! He knows what he’s doing.”
    I’d look at Mom, hoping for some sort of support. “You have things you’re good at, too ,” she’d say to me. “But Thomas is really good at this .”
    “What am I good at?” I asked.
    She had to think. “You’re a really good