Chapter 4: The House with Seven Rooms

The Gallivan house sat on a bluff in Tiburon with the whole bay spilled out below its windows.

It was much bigger than I had pictured and much shabbier than a hotel.

The porch boards were scuffed by decades of boots, and a child's bicycle had been hanging from a garage hook so long it had gone gray.

"Dinner," Brendan had said in the car.

"Then I drive you back to the Mission, and you never have to look at us again."

I had said yes because I had nowhere to put six pastry boxes and a banker's box of socks.

Inside, a hallway ran past a dining room with a table for fourteen.

Over the sideboard hung a portrait of the woman in the photograph, in oils, laughing with her head thrown back.

I looked at her, and I felt something I did not have a name for yet.

"Don't," said the second brother gently, at my elbow.

"She'll get you if you stare."

Upstairs, at the end of a long hall, was a closed door.

Nobody pointed at it.

Nobody needed to.

Brendan cooked.

He had braised short rib in a pot the size of a bucket and a loaf of bread baked the night before.

The fifth brother set the table.

The twin who didn't talk put a glass of red wine at my right hand and sat on my left, and the twin who did talk sat across and watched me eat.

"So," he said.

"What's your type?"

"That is not a dinner question," said the second brother, in the voice of an accountant who has found an error.

"It's the only dinner question," the twin said cheerfully.

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