Ah, my brother.

An hour later, I was on the lawn of St. Timothy’s. I had spent every Sunday morning of the first eighteen years of my life inside this early 1800s church filled with stained glass and dark wood pews. The quiet was otherworldly inside that church. Even when it was empty, you could walk inside and know you weren’t alone. My mother had made me serve as an acolyte every Sunday from the time I was big enough to carry the cross until the week I left for college. Sometimes, when the days were really hard, I could close my eyes and picture myself sitting in a chair beside the altar, wearing my vestment, and everything inside me would get still.

I saw my dad walking across the lawn and greeted him with a bear hug. Everybody said my dad could have spit me out. We were both just over six feet tall, with the same dimples and the same skinny legs. I got Mom’s blond hair, not his dark, but now that he’d gone gray, the difference wasn’t so pronounced.

“Son,” he said, clapping his hand on my shoulder. “Glad to have you home.”

Dad still owned his family’s farmland, but had scarcely seen a tractor since he was eighteen years old. He’d thought he’d break his dad’s heart by telling him that he wasn’t going to go into farming. He was going to go into insurance. He had been shocked when his parents were relieved.

Of all the jobs in the world, farming might be the toughest. In a life where little can be controlled, farming is a job where nothing—not the rain or the sun or the yield or the pests—can be controlled. Hurricane season is a horror, and tornado season is almost as bad. Ironically—or maybe not—my dad had gone into a business where he helped people safeguard against tragedy. After a life of living and dying by the corn season, he knew exactly what was at stake.

Looking around the front lawn at the old brick church, I saw my history. My family had lived in this town forever; these people scattered around eating lemon squares were my people. They would all hug me and ask me how I was, and for a minute, between the people who loved me and the two bourbons, I would feel like maybe I was okay.

I heard squeals coming from the adjacent softball field and laughed to see my brother pitching, underhanded, to a group of kids. He was laughing, too, which made me happy. For years and years he couldn’t even drive by this softball field, much less step onto it and throw a pitch. My brother was healing.

A hand clamped my shoulder and I turned to hug my friend Bart Steele, who I’d known since we were in diapers. “Watson, Spence, and I are fishing. Leaving the dock at five. You in?” The thing about having known someone since you were babies is you don’t have to make small talk.