My brother calls me because he is angry. He wants me to yell at our father.

I know why he has come to me. I know it the way you just know your sibling, even one you barely speak to. This person whose growing mirrored and entwined your own, who is the closest exact living being to you in genetics and upbringing, almost a twin, yet inverted: deliberately different on purpose, different by choice. I'd like to say he came to me because I am his bossy, mean big sister and I have always fixed things for him, or protected him, but that has never exactly been our relationship. I am not much of a fixer, as anyone who knows me can say, and he has never needed my sheltering.

He came to me because I have always been my father's special favorite, while he, the second born, has raged and fought and gone as different from that legacy as a person possibly could. He tends to the damage of our childhood like a bitter garden, while I am magnanimous, forgiving, looking for the relationship that wasn't possible when I was young. As always, I scrabble for whatever I can get. But my brother knows I can talk to my father, and my father may care, listen, or possibly be hurt by my condemnation, and in that way, I am a missile he can launch into him from afar.

As it happens, I have already yelled at my father. Instead, lost without a crusade, my brother and I talk. We don't talk much, even though I know he is still the boy that I snuck out at 4 am with to go lie on the hood of my Maxima and watch the meteor showers before high school. I taught him to drive, but so often now he seems older than me often, and always better than me.

For some reason, tonight, when we are talking about our disappointing father, I tell my brother about how sometimes when people around me are upset and start yelling, I get furious, almost out-of-control angry. Me! Who is never angry. This happens even if I'm not in any way the target of the yelling, even when the situation is in no way directed at anything to do with me, I lose my cool. I tell him about how I don't know why, but always figure this must be some black hole in me, some damage I can't parse, to have such an irrational response in a situation where I should go out of my way to be calm and placating. And maybe my father is the way he is sometimes in the same way: this helpless compulsive tell, this inherent brokenness. All response; no reason.

We talk more about death, the family, what can be done. We arrive at nothing. We make each other feel better about our own small parts. As I am talking to him, I am barefoot, dragging the trashcan up from the backyard to the curb for pickup. I could hear music when we first said hello, but now the other end is silent, and I think he has probably gone outside like he does when he talks on the phone. There is the sound of our breathing. Neither of us like to talk on the phone and we aren't good at it. Finally, he tells me that he does that too--that thing about the anger reaction. He says even when strangers beep at each other in traffic, it happens to him. That weird rage.

We say goodbye. I promise him we'll talk more when the weekend comes and I know what I'm doing. Maybe, I say, I'll send him a text. He says "I love you, Jess," and then I tell him I love him too, and then we say goodbye again, and then he says I love you again, and I tell him I do too.