“Well, sure, that’s part of it! It’s over for him. He wasn’t some hardened criminal. He had a chance for it to be better, and now he’ll never know how it all comes out.”

“What’s the other part of it?”

“Because it has to be better to live. And the other part...the other part is you. You don’t have a backup child. I don’t have a better brother.”

There was only one thing I could say to that.

Just before we got off our exit on the highway, Stefan spotted the all-night mom-and-pop pancake house where my father used to take him before dawn on the mornings they went fishing. “Can we stop, Mom?” he said.

I worried that he’d get sick again, or that we might run into someone. All I wanted now was to be inside our own home. But I agreed, even though my own stomach almost gave it up when he ordered waffles with whipped cream and strawberry jam. By then, however, I realized that I was ravenous, and dispatched a bowl of oatmeal and two orders of buttered wheat toast. As I gobbled, the server shied from me in a way I didn’t understand until I looked down at my hands and was shocked by how filthy they were, one nail sheared off in a gory grin. In the bathroom mirror, my face was similarly streaked with dirt and even some blood: I had apparently bitten through my lip at some point. I wanted to apologize to the woman, but what would I say? I’m a college professor... I don’t usually have blood on my mouth.

“Why didn’t you tell me how I looked?” I asked Stefan, when I sat back down.

“You look fine,” he said, rolling his eyes and nodding when I gestured at my face. “For real, nobody in here looks that good.” In the booth opposite us, two enormous farmers, in overalls of an incalculable size, were eating identical breakfasts. In front of each one was a plate of French toast with ham, two plates of bacon, and four fried eggs.

One of them waved shyly to the waitress. “Could I get a decaf skim cappuccino?” he asked.

We laughed then. Forgive me, we laughed. I hadn’t heard Stefan laugh in years.

He smiled at his waffles, as if they were little children. “I can eat anytime I want. And the food is clean,” he said. My stomach processed what he meant by “clean,” and its opposite, about the ghastliness of the way food might be prepared in a place where punishment was the first goal.