"I used to want to know all the secrets, and every time I learned one, I felt like I'd taken -- a step. On a journey. To a place. A destination: To be the kind of person who knew all this stuff, the way everyone around me seemed to know all this stuff. I thought that once I knew enough secrets, I'd be like them. "I don't want to learn secrets anymore, Andrew." She shrugged off his arm and took a faltering step down the slope, back toward the road. "I'll wait in the car, okay?" "Mimi," he said. He felt angry at her. How could she be so selfish as to have a crisis *now*, *here*, at this place that meant so much to him? "Mimi," he said, and swallowed his anger. # His three brothers stayed on his sofa for a week, though they only left one wet towel on the floor, only left one sticky plate in the sink, one fingerprint-smudged glass on the counter. He'd just opened his first business, the junk shop -- not yet upscale enough to be called an antiques shop -- and he was pulling the kinds of long hours known only to ER interns and entrepreneurs, showing up at 7 to do the books, opening at 10, working until three, then turning things over to a minimum-wage kid for two hours while he drove to the city's thrift shops and picked for inventory, then working until eight to catch the evening trade, then answering creditors and fighting with the landlord until ten, staggering into bed at eleven to sleep a few hours before doing it all over again. So he gave them a set of keys and bought them a MetroPass and stuffed an old wallet with $200 in twenties and wrote his phone number on the brim of a little pork pie hat that looked good on their head and turned them loose on the city. The shop had all the difficulties of any shop -- snarky customers, shoplifting teenagers, breakage, idiots with jumpy dogs, never enough money and never enough time. He loved it. Every stinking minute of it. He'd never gone to bed happier and never woken up more full of energy in his life. He was in the world, finally, at last. Until his brothers arrived. He took them to the store the first morning, showed them what he'd wrought with his own two hands. Thought that he'd inspire them to see what they could do when they entered the world as well, after they'd gone home and grown up a little. Which they would have to do very soon, as he reminded them at every chance, unmoved by George's hangdog expression at the thought. They'd walked around the shop slowly, picking things up, turning them over, having hilarious, embarrassing conversations about the likely purpose of an old Soloflex machine, a grubby pink Epilady leg razor, a Bakelite coffee carafe. The arguments went like this: George: Look, it's a milk container! Ed: I don't think that that's for milk. Fred: You should put it down before you drop it, it looks valuable. George: Why don't you think it's for milk? Look at the silver inside, that's to reflect off the white milk and make it look, you know, cold and fresh.