As he sat across from me at his ex-wife’s table, I could see the old Phil again, the only brother I ever had. He grinned, as if remembering it all himself, and I could hear the sounds of our childhood laughter as we roamed the streets and ran like wolves over rooftops and tried to stay three steps ahead of our parents. Jesus, we’d laughed a lot for kids who should have been permanently angry.

Outside Angie’s house, the clatter of hail sounded like a thousand sticks beating against the roof.

“What happened to you, Phil?”

His grin disappeared. “Hey, you—”

I held up a hand. “No. I’m not judging. I’m wondering. Like you told Bolton, we were like brothers. We were brothers, for Christ’s sake. And then you went south on me. When’d all the hate take over, Phil?”

He shrugged. “I never forgave you for some things, Pat.”

“Like what?”

“Well…You and Angie, you know…”

“Sleeping together?”

“Her losing her virginity to you. You were my best friends and we were all so Catholic and repressed and sexually skewed. And you two, that summer, you distanced from me.”

“No.”

“Oh, yes.” He chuckled. “Oh, yes. Left me with Bubba and Frankie Shakes and a bunch of other pituitary cases with mush for brains. And then—what was it, in August?”

I knew what “it” was. I nodded. “August fourth.”

“Down at Carson Beach, you two, well, did the deed. And then, genius that you were, you treated her like shit. And she came running to me. And I was second choice. Again.”

“Again?”

“Again.” He leaned back in his chair and spread his arms in an almost apologetic gesture. “Hey,” he said, “I always had charm and I always had my looks, but you had instinct.”

“You kidding me?”

“No,” he said. “Come on, Pat. I was always thinking things through too much, and you were doing them. You were the first guy to realize Angie wasn’t just one of the guys anymore, the first to stop hanging out on the corner, the first to—”

“I was restless. I was—”

“You were instinct,” he said. “You always could size up any situation before the rest of us and act on it.”

“Bullshit.”

“Bullshit?” He chuckled. “Come on, Pat. It’s your gift. ’Member those spooky fucking clowns in Savin Hill?”

I smiled and shivered at the same time. “Oh, yeah.”

He nodded, and I could tell that two decades later he still felt the fear that had gripped us for weeks after our encounter with the clowns.

“If you hadn’t thrown that baseball through their windshield,” he said, “who knows if we’d even be here today.”

“Phil,” I said, “we were kids with overactive imaginations and—”

He shook his head violently. “Sure, sure. We were kids and we were on edge because Cal Morrison had been killed that week and we’d been hearing rumors about those clowns since forever and blah, blah, blah. All that’s true, but we were there, Patrick. Me and you. And you know what would have happened to us if we’d gotten into that van with them. I can still see it. Shit. The grime and grease all over the fenders, that smell coming from the open window—”