Milo and I are attempting to do a typical “siblings hanging out” day, which entailed him coming with me to Target to pick out some stuff for Dad. I almost didn’t want him to accompany me into this sacred space; Target is where I go when I feel lost and untethered (so, most days). There’s something about the overhead lighting, so bright that it sterilizes all my worries away. Pushing the cart fills me with a sense of purpose. And there’s always the belief that this endcap or this clearance rack will hold the answer to something, that the next aisle over will have the solution to a problem I didn’t even know I had.

But Milo offered to come and I don’t want to discourage him from helping me. You know what they say: don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, even if that horse is your twin brother who basically abandoned you.

“Wave that thing somewhere else,” Milo says with a grimace. “If I wanted what you have, I’d go straight to the source and suck face with Mikey Danger myself.”

“Real mature,” I say, tossing some snack-size packages of Oreos into our cart.

“So . . . snacks, coloring books, colored pencils,” Milo says, looking through our cart. “Are we shopping for our dad or your secret toddler?”

The parallels between taking care of a relative with a degenerative disease and caring for a child have occurred to me before. There’s a lot of yelling, confusion, poor communication, defiance, and yes, snacks. But the thought sends me into a bad place where I start thinking about Dad’s mortality and my mortality and then it’s really hard to get my Target on, so I change the subject.

“Where’s Fred today?”

Milo always fights back a smile when he talks about Fred, like he’s afraid to share his unbridled joy with me. Frankly, it’s annoying.

“He’s doing a shoot for some discount chain store. I think he’s going to be wearing a lot of out-of-season track suits and, like, pulling the hoods off his head while staring at the camera like this.”

Milo stares toward the graham crackers with his lips pursed.

“I can see why Fred is the model in your relationship,” I say. “You’re terrible at smizing.”

“Great reference to a television show from like ten years ago,” Milo says, throwing a box of Chips Ahoy into the cart.

“Dad hates Chips Ahoy.”

“They’re for me. Duh,” Milo says. “Oh, can we stop by the frozen food aisle? I am in desperate need of pizza rolls.”

I turn to look at him. “Are you a teenage stoner?”

“Have you had pizza rolls lately? Teenage stoners are onto something. Anyway, Mikey ate an entire family-size bag the other night and I was like, ‘Um, answer me this: are you a family or are you one dude on a couch watching infomercials?’ and while he did not give me an answer, the point is I now have no pizza rolls.”