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family’s double shotgun in the Irish Channel. When Pops bought the house—after he was promoted to stevedore foreman at the Seventh Street Wharf—he opened the common wall of the semidetached, here in the living room and in the back, at the kitchen, making a unified home of it. Robert was ten, Jimmy was eight.
    As their father begins to snore, the brothers look at each other. It’s been more than a year since they’ve been together.Robert made his decision about the war on his own. The previous summer Jimmy was hitchhiking out west, and he spent Thanksgiving and Christmas somewhere in the Northeast with a girl he’d met on his travels.
    Without a word or a nod, the brothers rise and go out the front door and down the porch steps. Clay Square lies before them, the de facto front yard playground of their shared childhood. Two years apart, they were playmates and then enemies and then friends and then largely indifferent to each other, as they sought their own independent selves, and now neither of them is sure about the other. They are ready to be what they will become on this little walk together, as Robert goes to war and Jimmy enters his senior year at Loyola after months of faux vagabondage during the Summer of Love.
    They pause at the sidewalk and scan the broad, oak-edged sward of the park. The boys have too much history between them there, too much contending and screaming and too many tears and bloodied noses, long passed but with the affect still clinging to the place, and they turn south on Third Street, heading toward the river.
    “So you’ve done this,” Jimmy says.
    “This?”
    “The US Army in Vietnam.”
    Robert looks at Jimmy.
    He is visibly Robert’s brother, with the same jaw, their father’s jaw, but Jimmy is paler in hair and skin, missing their mother’s touches of darkness, which she got from her own mother, who was Italian. In spite of the confrontationalquickness of his remark, Jimmy isn’t looking at Robert. He’s keeping his eyes ahead, down the street.
    Robert says, “I did the
army.
It was up to them where they sent me.”
    “That’s a cop-out,” Jimmy says, though he still doesn’t look Robert’s way and his manner is matter-of-fact. “Did he put you up to it?”
    Robert knows who Jimmy means. Pops. As of this Labor Day weekend in 1967, they have both always called him that. But Jimmy invokes him now as an impersonal pronoun.
    “No,” Robert says at once, taking the words literally to make the answer simple. No, there was no overt conversation, no request or exhortation or plea.
    Jimmy says, “This isn’t his war, you know. Even if he wants to make it that. Ho Chi Minh is not Adolf Hitler. Far from it.”
    “I told you this isn’t about Pops.”
    “It’s an evil war,” Jimmy says.
    Robert says, “Did your girl of the summer put you up to this?”
    Jimmy stops walking abruptly.
    Robert stops too, turns to him. He expects a fight now.
    But even though Robert is a step in front of him, Jimmy keeps his eyes down the street.
    They stand like that for a long moment.
    Robert senses his brother grinding toward a choice. A fight is one option, clearly.
    Now Jimmy looks him in the eyes.
    From years of experience, Robert knows how to read his brother’s face. It surprises him now. Nothing is there that fits the way Jimmy began this conversation. No furrow, no flare, no twitch. Nothing that fits his temper.
    “My feelings are my own,” Jimmy says, and his voice is actually soft. Robert cannot remember the last time he heard this tone in his brother.
    “I believe you,” Robert says. Though he’s not sure he does. But he makes his own voice go soft as well.
    “I bet he’s proud of you,” Jimmy says. He is still managing his tone.
    “I don’t hear any sarcasm in that,” Robert says.
    “There isn’t any.”
    “Is she a flower child?” Robert says. “Teaching you gentleness?” He regrets it at once. No matter that he’s starting to hear Jimmy’s tone as an