“Get over yourself,” my brother said. “We all had the mumps, and we all looked like fat chipmunks. Remember, Mom and Dad made us breathe all over each other and share a root beer popsicle so they wouldn’t have to go through the mumps six times? You should be thanking me that I gave you a piece of my bubblegum.”

“It hurt to chew,” I said. “A lot.”

“Poor you,” Johnny said.

I looked out the trailer window, hoping for some backup. Christine had gone off with Carol and our dad. But I knew she’d show up here soon, afraid of missing something. She’d probably go back and forth, dividing her time between the man cave and the trailer, the way some people divide their time between houses in New York and Key West.

“Wait.” I gave Johnny a long look. “What happened to the hippie talk? And your man bun?”

Johnny ran a hand through his thick brown hair, which was already giving way to our dad’s snowy white. Of the six of us, Johnny probably looked the most like our dad, Michael like our mom. The rest of us were hybrids.

“I thought maybe I could try being somebody else,” Johnny said to the tabletop. “Since being myself hasn’t been working out so hot.”

“Well,” I said, “at least the hippie thing was relatively original. You didn’t embarrass yourself by going off and buying a midlife Porsche you can’t afford or anything. So, what was the rest of the fantasy? You were going to hitchhike out to the west coast and start a rock ’n’ roll camp for baby boomers?”

“Hazelnuts,” he said. “I was thinking I could start a hazelnut farm and come up with a healthy, sugar-free version of Nutella. And make a fortune, but in a good way.”

I shook my head. “That’s nuts.”

“Hardy har har,” my brother said. He was talking to the tabletop again.

“Any other genius ideas, Nutella?” I said.

“If you’re so smart, you figure out what I should do, Sherlock,” he said.

Clearly this conversation was going nowhere fast. I knew I’d have to report to Carol, so I figured I’d better cut to the chase.

“What happened with Kim?” I said softly.

My brother lifted his head up, slowly, like it weighed a ton. When he shifted around, the vinyl-covered dinette cushion squeaked like a whoopee cushion. I didn’t even make a crack, like telling him to say excuse me.

“She left me for someone else,” he said. “This dude she works with. She used to call him her work husband. I never thought anything of it. He took her skiing in Colorado for Thanksgiving. He invited the boys to go with them. And they went.”

“Ouch,” I said.