When I made that bet, I stopped betting. Not dying, drowning in fortune, sounded like the kind of luck that Nicholas would have. That bet sounded like my brother’s life.

I thought that one more bet could be the end of everything but him.

Many years ago, a woman at a garden party given by our mother asked Nicholas what he was going to be when he grew up.

Nicholas answered that he would not have to be anything. He told the woman that his mother and father were old and would die before he grew up. He told her they would leave him money, that when he grew up he was going to be rich. He told the woman that he was rich already from his grandmothers. Nicholas pointed to me and told the woman that we were both already richer, worth more, than our father. He said that we were worth more than our mother. We were richer, my brother told the woman, worth more, than our mother and our father put together. He told the woman that when our mother and father died we would be even richer.

Nicholas said, “More richer.”

There was no mistaking his delight. He did not need to smile to make his delight clear.

The woman told Nicholas that when boys grow up they have to be something. Even rich boys, the woman said, when they grow up, no matter how rich they are, have got to be something. Nicholas looked at the woman appraisingly, and said, “Not if they’re smart, they don’t.”

The woman insisted. She said that no matter how rich or how smart, boys had to be something. She said all boys had to.

Nicholas told the woman it was time for him to circulate.

Hours later, when the party was over and the guests had gone, I heard the woman’s voice in my doorway.

“Boys have to be something.”

I looked up from my bed, surprised the woman had not left, and I saw that her voice was not coming from her: it was not the woman who was speaking. It was Nicholas posing in the doorway, speaking with her voice.

He had turned his voice into the woman’s voice exactly.

I asked him to do it again.

He did. He repeated, word for word I think, everything that the woman had said in the garden, and every cadence was flawless, every syllable precise.

“All right,” Nicholas went on in the woman’s voice. “If I have to be something, I think I shall be captivating.”

That afternoon, twenty-five years ago, my brother gave, first to the woman in the garden, then later to me, a more or less visionary forecast of his life. What he said would happen did happen. Before he grew up he did find himself rich, and it is more than likely that he found himself captivating.

I have found a glass like the one in the photograph and have poured out the last of the tequila.