The Order of Affection
My father loved his fish. It was then, not unusual most evenings to observe him illuminated by the translucent coffin, massive and out of scale in the corner of our small living room.
My father’s history of service to the animal kingdom was impressive. He kept a canary named Pete for years.
Still, his devotion seemed inconsistent when considering the occasional shock of oily blues and bagged feathers splayed out on the refrigerator shelf. I used to fabricate stories about the feathers and the two shotguns shoved under the sofa like a detective reconstructing a murder. And though I was frightened by the idea of hunting and horrified by the rigid game, I was fairly comfortable with the guns. My father never spoke to me about either but found my startled reaction amusing.
I explained away his affection towards fish and birds (when he wasn't preying upon them) cats and later small dogs for the most part, as a significant alternative to humans. These were the relationships that could bring the occasional smile to his face.
In the hours after work, when he wasn't tending the reservoir, my father would descend into the basement to oversee smaller tanks, the surplus he needed to stock his titanic universe upstairs. Beneath a canopy of asbestos, the basement was where he communed with bubbling guppies and mollies. The tool closet however, was where he ate the walnuts.
Because of my life-threatening allergy to tree nuts, my father indulged his craving by customarily retreating into the shallow closet over by the entrance to our kitchen, at the top of the basement stairs. If I kept silent, I could hear him working the silver nutcracker from inside the closed door. The fact that even the tiniest trace of shell or oil was enough to suck the life out of me, only partially reinforced our distance. That my father and I hardly spoke took care of the rest. But still, seeing my father willingly sequestered by my allergy was to witness one of the rare occasions when he would agree to be inconvenienced with regard to something so well within his right.
He was being careful with my life. No one could argue this intentional act of goodwill. Besides, I knew the guns weren't loaded.
When he’d cracked the last nut into a bag, my father re-emerged to turn the key, carry the spent shells out to the trash and walk back into the kitchen to flush out what was hiding under his fingernails. Afterwards, he’d wipe down the doorknobs with a towel that would later have to be laundered.
He stepped out of his car and removed a suitcase before heading towards the train. My knees trembled as I grabbed my phone and zoomed in to take a photo. There on the small, cracked screen was the spitting image of my brother who’d been dead for five years.
Back when the call came, I bitterly accused my husband of lying. I feared the reverberation of his words would never stop. I paced the room, trying to conjure the last time I saw Dean. My eyes searched for objects that were still real, still as I remembered them seconds earlier while my brain mined my brother’s final visit to my house, moving between the kitchen and the front door. But a parting look or last word escaped me. What did play in my mind was a clip of my brother at sixteen in our childhood kitchen slipping a hot dog from the pack and then eating it raw; my brother cracking an egg into a glass of vanilla milk to grow muscles up and down his bony arms; my mother pressing a spatula to his daily consumption of grilled cheese and
bacon sandwiches; our grandmother spooning out a bowl of his favorite yogurt and dill soup with the extra rice to try and put weight on him.
We slept on twin beds in a room on the first floor of our three-family house. Dean was five years older, as a teen, still small, typically shirtless, with golden skin, long brown hair, a beard, and our dark hazel gaze. A sepia dining room portrait of Jesus Christ.
In spite of our close quarters, we hadn’t grown as close as we might have. Over time I sensed this as fallout from parents worn down and made silent by anger and disappointment. Later when Dean left for college it was as if the tired rubber band holding us together finally snapped. I didn’t see him much after that.
During those years, I watched Dean appear and reappear through gatherings like a magician’s sad trick. Though I knew he was somewhere, at any given moment I never really knew where. On the occasions when our paths did cross, we learned to compensate for the awkwardness we’d come to know, by tipping our heads ever so slightly to avoid a direct gaze; as if looking straight into each other’s eyes promised to be the scariest thing in the whole world. The distance, like long, lonely stretches of road between towns, made us forget any traces of an earlier time.
But one day, I was surprised to come across a family photo taken in our old living room. There, plump and pleased, I sat smiling in my highchair next to the sofa our mother had covered in a gold floral, to complement the wall-to-wall, burgundy brocade. Dean was beside me laying on his stomach, his head resting on elbows in a child’s sweet posture of endearment. I think he loved me there too, even if I had arrived after too many years to be a proper playmate. Still, the photo seemed to capture something wonderful that existed long before the story of our mother and father turned oppressive and impossible to distill, before Dean and I grew like parallel weeds who worried about everything and nothing, and who based our life’s decisions between trusting too much and not trusting enough. Instead of turning to each other, we turned away, abandoning our longing for connection and becoming tentative in our own lives, footprints that vanished soon after they were made.
In time, I found my footing, but I still didn’t know how to look back. Sadly, Dean and I had only begun to talk about this in the months before he died. And with the swift realization that our time was up, news of his death and the grief that followed hit me like a two-by-four.
It was months later when I began to see my brother’s walking twins; occasionally, at first, and eventually with enough frequency to force me into a deeper meaning.
It might have made more sense to run into Dean as the teenager I most recall instead of the sixty-year-old man who walked like our father. I recognize his body from various angles and distances. Sometimes it’s his profile that destroys me. Once at a red light I looked over to find him sitting at the wheel of a tired Ford pick-up truck. A year later during my first trip to London, I locked onto him like a missile, three tables over at a champagne brunch in the hotel restaurant. And two summers ago, I could hardly believe it when he walked right by me, beer in hand while weaving through a raucous crowd at an outdoor festival. I desperately trailed him until I got too close and he morphed into a stranger before my eyes.
Today at the station I spotted him from behind, a dead ringer with thinning hair at the crown, jeans too long and loose, and that sad, defeated shuffle in his step. I always swear it’s him. My brother had figured out how to mess with me from the dead. He had after all introduced me to real itching powder hidden inside my sheets, and balsa wood rockets launched within inches of our faces in the side yard. And I couldn’t count the number of times I’d fallen for his finger-snapping stick of Wrigley’s. But one night he went too far when he peeked out from behind our bedroom door wearing a rubber monster mask, inspiring the same terrifying nightmare for weeks. Still, I laughed when he cracked all my eggs on Easter mornings, deploying the one blood-red dummy he'd carved from wax.
In his junior year of high school, Dean moved upstairs to the storage room across from the apartment on the third floor of our house and high above the trunks of the massive elms, whose branches filled the only window in this peculiar space. It was in this room that my brother cooked the lead he needed to make the weights for his scuba diving hobby. Though hobby seems too wholesome of a term since my brother’s attention to the sport was a lonely and risky endeavor.
I’d climb the three flights of stairs, quickly at first and then more cautiously once I began to breathe the noxious cloud creeping down from his room. My brother would be hovering over the single electric burner, stretching the frayed hem of his shirt to cover his knuckles before pouring the molten lead into a row of neat metal molds. It was the chemistry that fueled his method, the certainty of the melting element that drew him to the task. A few years later, Dean discovered ice climbing, rising from the depths of the black sea like Zeus draped in neon rope and spikes to scale impossible rock. By nightfall, he’d lay down his axe and secure a tiny hammock along the face of a glistening drop.
I sometimes wonder if these memories, powerfully drawn from recent sightings of Dean, are meant to remind me of what still binds us. Because I see him now as I saw him then, like an unexpected bloom of stars on a moonless night. And during every one of these breath-holding, beamed-in phenomenons I rejoice at the chance to finally offer him my warmest smile and my deepest embrace. I’d cook his favorite dinner of steamed clams, buttered ears of corn and heaps of pistachios he liked shelling with his teeth. I’d pull out my best chair and hand him the icy ale I’d have waiting in the fridge. I’d welcome him like the prince he could never believe he was. Because in the moment when I lost Dean, love, rooted deep in childhood, crawled out of hiding. After Dean died, a therapist introduced me to the concept of complicated grief. It wasn’t that complicated, though. I’d squandered the opportunity to hold my brother, and to show him the unconditional love he deserved to feel. Instead, I kept my distance because I feared what lurked and rose to the surface whenever we were together. I made him question and doubt and hopelessly yearn for connection. I forced him to swim at the foot of barriers I sank to avoid us revisiting childhood trauma.
But regret, I’ve come to realize, is a passive, worthless, selfish emotion. And by clutching it so tightly in its original form, I continue to focus on something I cannot change and yet still has the power to crush me. So I have to assemble something else, a way to attach sorrow to an action I can live with. There are others in my life that I still choose or have chosen to wall off.
I am walking, now running behind the man at the train station. I’m gaining on him when he suddenly turns and I stop. “Can I help you?” he asks. I look up and search his eyes for forgiveness.
© 2026 Marietta Morelli