Breeze arrived, clutching the baby in one arm, a wrapped package in the other. A suitcase sat at her feet. When I met her at the front door, I noticed her husband waving to me from their car. “We’d stay a bit, but we’re in a hurry,” Breeze said. Her breath clouded the air. The older boy, Michael, whirlwinded past me to perch beside the television. Breeze stared at him. “TV should keep him occupied.” I took the baby from her arms, and she positioned the suitcase and package inside the door. “Diapers, food, all the necessities. The gift is just some fruit,” she, said. “Better eat it quick or it will spoil.” She dug into her pocket and handed me a matchbook with a telephone number written on it. “We’ll be at this number. We’ll return before dark. I hope everything goes okay. Good-bye, Michael.” She kissed the baby’s head. “Good-bye, David.”

Brian walked in, scrubbing a towel across wet hair. Eric pointed across the room toward Michael, who hadn’t taken his eyes from the cartoon. The cat gulped a birthday cake which, unbeknownst to the animal, was crammed with dynamite; its stomach exploded, and the cat became a blackened shadow with shocked white eyes. Michael rocked to and fro, still wearing his coat, giggling along with the cartoon mouse.

Brian saw my armful of David, and he placed his fingers against the baby’s face. “Wow.” I pushed David forward a little, and one tiny hand reached out, as if beckoning Brian to hold him. “He won’t cry, will he?” I shrugged and delivered him into Brian’s arms.

“He feels like a gigantic sponge,” Brian said into David’s face. His voice altered, becoming thinner, inching up half an octave. “And somebody’s squeezed the water from the sponge, but there’s still a little bit left in there, just enough to keep the sponge damp.” He thumbed David’s nose. Eric looked at me, one eyebrow raised.

In the following hour, Brian and Eric helped me feed the baby, took turns trying to burp him, and clumsily assisted when I changed his diaper. They waited for him to fall asleep, gently smoothing creases on his shirt. David nodded off at last, and while he snoozed on the living room floor, Brian and Eric headed for the kitchen. They made lunch: peanut butter sandwiches, formed into shapes from Christmas cookie cutters. Mine was a star; Brian and Eric got bells; and Michael, a fat Santa Claus, toy-filled sack slung on his back. Michael licked a dot of peanut butter from his upper lip. “Mommy always lets me have dessert,” he said.

Eric remembered the fruit and fetched Breeze’s gift from its spot at the doorway. I let Michael rip through the paper. Inside a basket, behind see-through green cellophane, were pears, oranges, apples, bananas. “Some Xmas present,” Eric said.

Michael stared awhile, deciding. He was a ferocious-looking child, with a pug nose and hair the color of copper. His forehead sprouted a cowlick, the skin beneath it revealing a vein’s blue squiggle. He selected a pear and put it to his lips. His mouth punched a miniature hole into its yellow skin. “Yuck.” He handed the pear to Eric, who stood and began juggling the pear, an orange, and an apple. He tossed them into various configurations, hands snagging them from the air like a magician’s. Michael watched, fascinated.

Brian selected three paring knives from the kitchen. He lined a red Delicious, a yellow, and a green Granny Smith side by side, forming a stoplight pattern on the floor. He told Eric and me to take our pick. “We’ll show you how to make apple-head dolls,” he said to Michael. Brian and I had done this once when we were little. We’d skinned apples and carved faces, then arranged them in a window to harden and degenerate. Over a period of weeks, the apples took shape, wrinkling into amber-colored “heads” that looked like shrewd, prehistoric people. We’d jammed pencils into the heads and dressed them in doll clothes.

Michael gawked as we began peeling and carving. I whittled slits for eyes, nostrils, a frown; my apple took on the countenance of an evil crone. Eric changed the round shape of his face completely, giving it sunken cheeks, a square jawline, even meticulously shaping rows of square teeth.

Brian couldn’t decide what to carve. Eric and I displayed our dolls as we completed each feature, but after Brian finished peeling, he passed his smooth apple from palm to palm, indecisive. “Mine’s a skull,” Eric told him, “so how about your trademark alien?”

Brian looked disgusted for a second. “I knew you’d say that.” He adjusted his glasses, thumbprinting one lens with apple juice. “I told you to shut up about it. It’s history.” Eric fidgeted, and I concentrated harder on my knife’s placement in my doll. Brian stabbed the knifepoint into the apple and curved it, hollowing out an almond-shaped eye. Another. The rest of his face was easy: two pinpricks for nostrils, a feeble cut for a mouth. He rubbed his thumbs into the apple-head’s eyes, as if polishing them. “There,” he told Eric. “Satisfied?”

When finished, we displayed the apples for Michael. “Normally,” Brian instructed, “you’d wait for these heads to dry. But we don’t have to do that.” He grinned at Eric, apparently no longer angry. He searched the house for pencils and returned with three, fashioning bodies for the apple dolls.

The telephone rang, and I ran to the kitchen. It was my mother, calling from work to check up. I told her about baby-sitting, how Brian and Eric had helped me through the day. “Is everything okay with Brian?” she asked. When I said I guessed so, she seemed relieved. “He’s been acting funny lately. More and more as Christmas approaches, though I can’t tell why. Maybe I’m imagining things. But he was awake before I left this morning, and that was unnatural. Just staring out the window, all nervous.”

“I don’t know.” I peeked into the front room, where Eric and Brian, now ventriloquists, performed a demented apple puppet show for Michael. Eric gripped the pencil bodies of the skull and alien apples and skipped them toward Michael. The little boy screamed. Brian quickly grabbed the alien doll from Eric’s hand and pushed it aside.

My mother was still talking, and I tried to assimilate her words with those between Eric and Brian. Their conversation, while hushed, seemed more interesting. Eric asked “What’s wrong?” but I didn’t catch my brother’s answer. Eric mentioned something about “one more day, then you’ll calm down.”

I heard an intercom page my mother’s name on the other end. “Sergeant Lackey, line one.” She paused. “You kids know I love you,” she said. Another pause. “You will tell Brian I love him, won’t you?”

“Yes.” In the next room, Michael giggled. “Stop worrying,” I heard Eric say. I looked in; he was speaking to Brian, not Michael. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

I didn’t think about what my mother had said until that evening, when Breeze returned for her children. Michael rushed for the door, and Brian lifted David from the floor as if his skin were glass. He surrendered the baby into Breeze’s arms. It immediately began crying; for an alarming second its cranky and swollen face resembled one of the carved apples. Breeze thanked us, and Brian swallowed a breath and gripped her shoulder. “Please take good care of them,” he told her. “Keep both eyes on them, no matter what.” I wondered what that meant. I looked to see if Eric mirrored my slight embarrassment, but he was watching the floor.

My mother’s words echoed in my head again later, after Eric had driven back to Hutchinson. I stood at the sink finishing dishes. From the window I saw Brian, bundled in his coat, tramping through the blustery wind on the hillside. He crouched down, burrowing in the dirt with his fingers. He placed something in the little grave he’d dug. Then he stood again and began stomping his feet on the mound of dirt, as if throwing a tantrum he’d been waiting to throw for years. I instantly thought of the night our father had left, and the mindless dance Brian had reeled through, there in that very spot.