The Snow Queen. Michael Cunningham

      Tyler shuts his eyes, wincingly, as he would at the onset of a headache. He does not want to be, will not be, the one who won’t tolerate a joke, the uncle who has to be invited at the holidays even though we all know how he’s going to carry on about … whatever injustice or betrayal or historical malfeasance he wears like a suit of iron, soldered to his body.

      “What I’m worried about,” Tyler says, “is Ohio.”

      “I think it’ll be all right,” Barrett answers. “I have a feeling. Or, well, I have hope.”

      He has hope. Hope is an old jester’s cap by now. Faded motley, with that little tin bell at the tip. Who has the energy to wear it anymore? But who’s courageous enough to doff it, leave it crumpled in the lane? Not Tyler.

      “I do too,” he says. “I have hope and belief and even a particle or two of actual faith.”

      “How are you doing with Beth’s song?”

      “I’m a little stuck,” Tyler says. “But I think I made some progress last night.”

      “Good. That’s good.”

      “Giving her a song seems kind of … small, don’t you think?”

      “Of course not. I mean, what kind of wedding gift do you think would mean more to her? A BlackBerry?”

      “It’s so impossible.”

      “Writing songs is hard. Well, pretty much everything is hard, right?”

      “I guess,” Tyler says.

      Barrett nods. They pass through a moment of silence as old as either of them can remember, the quietude of growing up together, of sleeping in the same room; the shared quiet that has always been their true element, interrupted of course by talks and fights and farts and laughter over the farts but essential, the atmosphere to which they’ve always returned, a field of soundless oxygen made up of their combined molecules.

      Tyler says, “Mom got struck by lightning on a golf course.”

      “Uh, you know, I know that.”

      “Betty Ferguson said at the memorial that she’d been three under par that day.”

      “I know that, too.”

      “Big Boy got hit by the same car, twice. Two years in a row. And it didn’t kill him either time. Then he choked to death on a Snickers bar at Halloween.”

      “Tyler, really.”

      “Then we got another beagle and named him Big Boy Two, and he got squashed by the son of the woman who’d hit Big Boy One, twice. It was the first time the woman’s son had driven by himself, it was his sixteenth birthday.”

      “Why are you saying all this?”

      “I’m just listing the impossibilities that happened anyway,” Tyler says.

      “So, like, Bush won’t be reelected.”

      Tyler doesn’t say, And Beth will live. He doesn’t say, The chemo is working.

      He says, “I just want this fucking song to be good.”

      “It will be.”

      “You sound like Mom.”

      Barrett says, “I am like Mom. And you know, really, it won’t matter if the song isn’t great. Not to Beth.”

      “It’ll matter to me.”

      Barrett’s sympathy blooms in his eyes, which darken for Tyler the way their father’s do. Although their father is not an especially gifted father, this is one of his talents. He has the ability, when needed, to perform this little eye-shift, a deepening and dilating that says to his sons, You don’t have to matter any more than you do right now.

      They should call him, it’s been, what, more than a week now. Maybe two.

      Why did he marry Marva so soon after Mom died? Why did they move to Atlanta, what do they do down there?

      Who is this guy, where did the plaid come from, how can he love Marva—Marva’s okay, she’s fun in her crude, shock-the-boys way, you learn not to stare at the scar, but how can their dad cease to be Mom’s solicitous penitent? The deal was always so clear. She was the cherished and endangered one (lightning found her), it was right there on her face (the milk-blue Slavic fineness of it, her hand-carved quality, her porcelain glaze). Their father was the designated driver, the guy who enforced naps, the one who got panicky when she was half an hour late; the middle-aged boy who’d sit under her window in the rain until he caught his death.

      And now, this person. This man who wears Tommy Bahama shorts, and Tevas. This guy who rockets around Atlanta with Marva in a Chrysler Imperial convertible, blowing cigarillo smoke up at whatever constellations appear over Georgia.

      It’s probably easier on him, being this guy. Tyler doesn’t, won’t, begrudge it.

      And, really, their father was released from paternal duty years and years ago, wasn’t he? It may have occurred as early as those drinking sessions with Barrett, during the days after their mother’s service.

      They were seventeen and twenty-two. They just hung around the house like stray dogs for a few days, in briefs and socks, drinking down the supply (the scotch and vodka led to the gin, which led to the off-brand tequila, which led eventually to a quarter-full bottle of Tia Maria, and an inch of Drambuie that had probably been there twenty years or more).

      They languished for days in the suddenly famous living room, surrounded by all the ordinary things that had so abruptly become her things. Tyler and Barrett, sloppy and scared and shocked, getting hammered in their briefs and socks; it was (maybe it was) the night they turned a particular corner …

       Do you ever think?

       What?

      They were lying together on the sofa that had always been there, the crappy beat-up biscuit-colored sofa that was managing, as best it could, its promotion from threadbare junk to holy artifact.

       You know.

       What if I don’t know?

       You fucking do.

       Okay, yeah. Yes. I, too, wonder if Dad worried so much about every single little goddamned thing …

       That he summoned it.

       Thanks. I couldn’t say it.

       That some god or goddess heard him, one time too many, getting panicky about whether she’d been carjacked at the mall, or had, like, hair cancer …

       That they delivered the thing even he couldn’t imagine worrying about.

       It’s not true.

       I know.

       But we’re both thinking about it.

      That may have been their betrothal. That may have been when they took their vows: We are no longer siblings, we are mates, starship survivors, a two-man crew wandering the crags and crevices of a planet that may not be inhabited by anyone but us. We no longer need, or want, a father.

      Still, they really have to call him. It’s been way too long.

      “I know,” Barrett says. “I know it’ll matter to you. But I think you should remember that it won’t, to her. Not in the same way.”

      Barrett, bluff-chested, naked in graying water, is in particular possession of his pink-white, grandly mortified glow.

      “I’m going to make some coffee,” Tyler says.

      Barrett stands up in the tub, streaming bathwater, a hybrid of stocky robust manliness and plump little boy.