The Husband

as buoyant as Anson.
    The kitchen clock read 7:24. A traffic backup from an accident had delayed him.
    On the table stood a bottle of Chianti Classico and a half-full glass. Anson opened a cabinet, plucked another glass from a shelf.
    Mitch almost declined the wine. But one round would not dull his wits and might restore some elasticity to his brittle nerves.
    As Anson poured the Chianti, he did a fair imitation of their father's voice. "Yes, I'm pleased to see you, Mitch, though I didn't notice your name on the visiting-progeny schedule, and I had planned to spend this evening tormenting guinea pigs in an electrified maze."
    Accepting the Chianti, Mitch said, "I just came from there."
    "That explains your subdued manner and your gray complexion." Anson raised his glass in a toast. "La dolce vita."
    "To your new deal with China," Mitch said.
    "Was I used as a needle again?"
    "Always. But he can't push hard enough to puncture me anymore. Sounds like a big opportunity."
    "The China thing? He must've hyped what I told him. They aren't dissolving the Communist Party and giving me the emperor's throne."
    Anson's consulting work was so arcane that Mitch had never been able to understand it. He had earned a doctorate in linguistics, the science of language, but he also had a deep background in computer languages and in digitalization theory, whatever that might be.
    "Every time I leave their place," Mitch said, "I feel the need to dig in the dirt, work with my hands, something."
    "They make you want to flee to something real."
    "That's it exactly. This wine's good."
    "After the soup, we're having lombo dimaiale con castagne."
    "I can't digest what I can't pronounce."
    "Roast loin of pork with chestnuts," Anson said.
    "Sounds good, but I don't want dinner."
    "There's plenty. The recipe serves six. I don't know how to cut it down, so I always make it for six."
    Mitch glanced at the windows. Good—the blinds were shut.
    From the counter near the kitchen phone, he picked up a pen and a notepad. "Have you gotten any sailing in lately?"
    Anson dreamed of one day owning a sailing yacht. It should be large enough not to seem claustrophobic on a long coastal run or perhaps even on a voyage to Hawaii, but small enough to be managed with one mate and an array of sail motors.
    He used the word mate to mean his fellow sailor but also his companion in bed. Regardless of his bearish appearance and sometimes acerbic sense of humor, Anson was a romantic not just about the sea but also about the opposite sex.
    The attraction women felt for him could not be called merely magnetic. He drew them as the gravity of the moon pulls the tides.
    Yet he was no Don Juan. With great charm, he turned away most of his pursuers. And each one that he hoped might be his ideal woman always seemed to break his heart, though he would not have put it that melodramatically.
    The small boat—an eighteen-foot American Sail—that he currently moored at a buoy in the harbor was by no measure a yacht. But given his luck at love, he might one day own the vessel of his dreams long before he found someone with whom to sail it.
    In answer to Mitch's question, he said, "I haven't had time to do more than bob the harbor like a duck, tacking the channels."
    Sitting at the kitchen table, printing in block letters on the notepad, Mitch said, "I should have a hobby. If you've got sailing, and the old man has dinosaur crap."
    He tore off the top sheet of the pad and pushed it across the table so that Anson, still standing, could read it: YOUR HOUSE IS PROBABLY BUGGED.
    His brother's look of astonishment had a quality of wonder that Mitch recognized as similar to the expression that had overtaken him when he had read aloud the pirate yarns and the tales of heroic naval battles that thrilled him as a boy. His initial reaction seemed to be that some strange adventure had begun, and he appeared not to grasp the implied danger.
    To cover Anson's stunned silence, Mitch said, "He just bought a new specimen. He says it's a ceratosaurus dropping. From Colorado, the Upper Jurassic."
    He presented another sheet of paper on which he had printed THEY'RE SERIOUS. I SAW THEM KILL A MAN.
    While Anson read, Mitch withdrew his cell phone from an inside coat pocket and placed it on the table. "Given our family history, it'll be so appropriate—inheriting a collection of polished shit."
    As Anson pulled out a chair and sat at the table, his boyish expression of expectation clouded with worry.