“Fun? Are you serious? The crisis folks are coming tonight. They’re going to give us a media strategy and we’re going to follow it word for word. I guarantee you it doesn’t include dancing the floss for the paps,” my father says.

“Sorry, Dad,” Hudson says, and even though I’ve been hearing Hudson call my father “Dad” all my life—and it too is accurate—it always chafes. In my mind, my dad belongs to us, not to him. Which is unfair. And selfish. I don’t know what it is about my brain that divides us into teams. “Just so you know, you don’t say ‘dancing the floss.’ You just say flossing.”

“To what do we owe the pleasure, Hudson?” my mother asks, and her tone is hard and angry, a slice. Usually, she’s warm to my half brother, even when he doesn’t deserve her kindness. Once he showed up so loaded to our big Easter brunch that he passed out in the backyard. Instead of getting angry, my mom put him to bed upstairs so he wouldn’t disturb the guests. She didn’t even yell at him later after everyone had left.

I got yelled at that day, though, for taking off my tights, the ones with cute bunnies on the knees, in the bouncy castle. She said my behavior was “unladylike” and “unbecoming” and that I hadn’t been “raised in a barn.”

I was eight, only beginning to learn the contours of my mother’s professional life, how even hosting a brunch and a bouncy castle in the backyard required a certain level of performance.

“Oh, hello, stepmonster,” Hudson says, which is what he calls my mom. She pretends not to mind, but I did once hear her complain about it to Dad: If he has to be offensive, at least he could try to be a bit clever. “I was worried about you guys. Wanted to make sure everything was under control. As you know, I have a wee bit of experience getting into trouble with the law myself.”

If for a moment, even after his front-lawn performance, any of us has been clueless enough to hope that Hudson was clean, our hopes are shattered when he starts to sway to the right and has to reach for the console table to steady himself.

“For Christ’s sake,” my dad yells, voice cracking. “We are not dealing with this right now.”

“I see a lot of suits here. Last time I was arrested you refused to pay for my lawyer,” Hudson says.