He was a local hero, Frank Belanger Esq., Injury Law, a successful attorney in our town of Littleford. Because of our name (school kids are such mockers of names), we Belanger brothers were known as the Bad Angel brothers. Frank was a tough opponent but a good ally, very wealthy from the accumulation of contingency fees from personal injury and medical malpractice suits. Whiplash windfalls, he called them. He made no secret of his ambition, crowing to me when we were kids, I want to be so rich I can shit money! He defended wounded, usually poor people; so justice was money, punishment was money, reward was money, morality was money, love was money. His admiring clients quoted his well-known remark, with approval, I bite people on the neck for a living.

He’d plagiarized that, and other wisecracks, from a ruthless lawyer he’d worked for, named Hoyt. I was no match for Frank’s sarcasm and his competitive nature, or his killer instinct. I had left home to escape his shadow. My work as a geologist kept me away, at first in the West, then in the wider world, a spell in Africa, later—my cobalt years—in the Northwest. Earlier, when I married Vita, I bought a house in town and returned more and more frequently as my mother aged and was cheered by visits. Vita, who’d grown up in the unregulated sprawl and improvisation of South Florida, found the solidity and order of New England a reassurance. And this was also a chance for our son, Gabe, to attend my old high school and be a Littleford Lion.

Usually, when he heard I was in town, Frank insisted on our meeting for lunch, always at the Littleford Diner—he’d once owned a part interest in “the spoon,” as he sometimes called it, short for “the greasy spoon.” If I was free I tended to agree, because seeing him, hearing his stories, I was able to gauge the temperature of our relationship. Family members have a special untranslatable language, of subtle gestures, finger play, winks and nods, little insults, odd allusions and needling words, that are devastating within the family yet mean nothing to an outsider.

But when Vita urged me to have lunch with him, I smiled—and equivocated. And a few days later I said flatly no, because of the way Frank himself asked in an e-mail, framing it as a demand, putting Lunch in the subject line, with the date and time, and the message, Be there.