I was sitting in a heart clinic two hundred miles from home, pretending to read a magazine I wasn’t really reading, when a laugh came rolling down the hall. I knew that laugh before my head even came up.

A man laughs the same way his whole life. I’d have known Wayne’s anywhere, even after thirty-seven years of not hearing it. I stood up too fast for a man my age, and the room went a little sideways on me.

There he was at the front desk. Gray as I am now. Holding the same clinic paperwork I had folded up in my own hand. Bad hearts run in our family, I guess. Go figure that it’d be the thing to put us in the same building again. I just stood there, half up out of my chair, while a young nurse asked him to spell his last name. Our last name. And I waited to see if he’d turn around.

Let me back up, because none of this makes a lick of sense unless you knew us before.

Wayne is two years older than me. We grew up on our daddy’s place outside a little nothing town in Missouri, and for the first twenty years of our lives we were pretty much the same person. Same chores, same hand-me-down boots, same crooked teeth. Daddy used to say he couldn’t tell us apart on the telephone. He’d pick up and start in, and halfway through he’d say, “Now which one of you is this?” And we had the same laugh. That was the big one. Mama swore she couldn’t tell whose laugh was whose from the next room. Two boys, one laugh. Bless them both, they thought that was the funniest thing in the world.