After I paid $77,000 for my brother’s wedding, he sent me to the wrong city in Italy “as a joke.” I landed in Naples while they were celebrating in Florence. The next morning, he texted: “LOL, I just didn’t want you there.” My mother added, “This is your fault.” I didn’t argue. I smiled… and sent her a gift—four feet tall, delivered by courier. She called me in tears: “Can I please pay you back?”

The thing about golden children is they’re rarely golden alone. Somebody has to polish them. Somebody has to explain away the dents. In our house, that was my mother, Diane, with her pressed cardigans and her careful voice and her endless ability to translate Ethan’s cruelty into personality.

“He’s spirited.”

“He doesn’t mean it.”

“You know how he is.”

Those were her favorite hymns.

My father had been softer, or maybe just quieter. He died when I was fifteen, a Tuesday in November that smelled like wet leaves and burnt coffee from the church basement where people brought casseroles we didn’t need. After that, the house got sharper. Ethan became “the man of the family,” which was funny, considering he couldn’t load a dishwasher without acting like he deserved a medal. Mom became more devout about him. More invested. More protective. Like grief had taken one of her pillars and she’d decided to build the next one entirely out of her son.

I became the spare set of hands.