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sons that he wanted.
    Months would pass before he’d get another job and the whole process would start all over again.
    He’d talk about how he didn’t need to work, as if he’d earned a fortune himself. Instead, he dipped into the principal of an ever-shrinking inheritance and cursed his father and grandfather. “Greedy bastards, the both of them,” he’d say. “Ripped the guts out of me.”
    Weekends and evenings, he’d go from near catatonic to hyperactive depending upon what he was taking.
    Ross and Greg would escape into the cove and the woods surrounding it. They’d sail, go rowing, diving … just hang out in the woods for hours at a time. Greg came home with a tent one day, announced with a false cheerfulness that he wanted to do some camping. The two of them slept out in the tent overlooking the cove many a night when their father was really in bad shape. Without discussing it, they covered for their father, letting no one in school know what was going on.
    At age forty-eight Brody had declared himself retired, that there were no jobs equal to his creativity. Ross had been just under fifteen.
    Greg had taken everything onto his own shoulders. Getting Ross off to school, keeping the house reasonably clean, helping the old man up to his bedroom when he couldn’t make it himself. He had eventually started losing weight, turning into a gray shell of a man with watery blue eyes and a red flush of broken blood vessels across his nose and cheeks.
    And he’d begun hitting more and more often.
    Greg was no coward. He was strong and would take care of himself in schoolyard fights. But when the old man had started swinging over the coffee being too cold or that Ross was out too late, Greg would take the blows, pleading for the old man to come to his senses.
    One night when Ross was fifteen, he threw himself at the old man. He woke up minutes later with one of his teeth chipped. Greg was pushing his father back, shouting, “Look what you did, for Christ’s sake!”
    His father had looked at Greg and touched the blood on his own mouth and said, “Shut up, you little shit. He understands me. He and I are just alike.”
    That had chilled Ross then, and he’d thought of it often behind prison bars.
    When Greg had decided to commute to a local community college even though he’d been offered a scholarship at Cornell, Ross had objected. “Go, for God’s sake.”
    “I can’t leave you here.”
    “The hell you can’t. Go.”
    Finally, they had compromised, with Greg going two hours away to Amherst College and planning to come home on weekends.
    Ross had watched his brother’s car roll away with the blackest despair. He’d tried to keep the peace for almost a month, making the meals, taking care of the old man.
    But one night after a trip to Laconia Speedway in New Hampshire, Ross came home to find the old man waiting with the very gun Ross was now oiling. He’d raged that Ross had damn well better learn to behave—whatever specific infraction Ross had committed was unclear.
    Ross had simply turned on his heel and walked out.
    He’d gotten back into the car, and on the way out of the Sands, he’d done a quick assessment. Saw that he’d grown up in a place that he loved, with a father he’d learned to hate. That with Greg in school, his family life was on hold. That he might as well do what he most wanted to do—learn to race a car so fast there was room for nothing else in his head but the speed, the upcoming turns, the win ahead.
    For if he stayed at home, he and his father would very likely kill each other. It took Ross a few days to land a job on a pit crew for a stock car driver named Bill Cobb. Ross had quit school on his sixteenth birthday and hit the road.
     
    Six years later, Greg had walked into Ross’s hospital room and told him their father had overdosed on cocaine and died of heart failure.
    Already Greg looked older than his twenty-four years, wearing a trench coat and a sport jacket