Dewy was two years older, but by the time I was eleven and he thirteen, I was already a head taller and working on a mustache. None of this mattered, because Dewy was light-years sharper, and it was understood that my growing older would do nothing to close the gap. It wasn’t that he was a genius—he was smart, though nothing to alert the news about—but that he had a politician’s combination of grit and cunning. He was constantly sharpening his senses to prepare for the more generous world he was certain awaited him outside of our mother’s house. He studied chess and electrical engineering and said things like indubitably just to be an asshole. In his free time, he taught himself Portuguese and Morse code, memorized the name of every capital city in the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, I was a pain in the public school system’s thigh, or so a janitor once told me. Whatever hope my mother had for her progeny resided wholly and completely in Dewy. And so when our mother began bringing home men, Dewy took it worse than I did—he had more to lose. He understood that our mother was a limited commodity, and that any time and energy spent on a man was less time and energy spent on him.

The men were all the same—short, lecherous creatures with halos of hair and greasy skin. Most were from Kansas City and had at least one fat wife under their belts. Dewy hated each one more than the last. He put thumbtacks in their loafers and accused them, without any rationale, of being Nazis. “Heil Hitler?” he would say to them in passing.

Most didn’t last more than two dates.

Despite Dewy’s efforts, our mother eventually attached herself to one of these men, and it was like watching a swan eat a cigarette butt. I’d seen this once, during a field trip to the botanical gardens, when Miss Robertson flicked her cigarette into the bird pond.

This was all at the beginning of summer break, when Dewy and I had no time for new enemies. There were rocket ships to build and neighbor girls to terrify. And yet there he was—in our house, at our dinner table, his massive hands slithering all over our mother’s body.

His name was Walter McDonald, but we took to calling him the Weenie. His skin was the color and texture of a cooked hotdog and, on most nights, he came to dinner smelling of Canadian bacon. He owned a chain of pizza parlors, and it was with this money—this pizza money—that he purchased our mother’s affection. Within weeks, objects began to materialize around the house: a television, a set of aerating wine glasses, a shiny red KitchenAid. On our mother’s slender neck, a string of pearls the size of baby teeth. Her wardrobe transformed and she became the type of woman who wore silk blouses with opalescent snaps instead of T-shirts that advertised national parks she’d never been to. “Isn’t your mom a looker?” the Weenie would say before covering her with a barrage of kisses.