Dale stopped laughing and asked our mother what she meant by either. She did not answer. She stood up slow, holding the edge of the table, and walked to the hall closet, and came back with an old shoebox tied with string.
She set it in front of both of us. Your father knew, she said. About both of you. He knew from the very first day.
Inside were two hospital bracelets, two birth certificates, and a photograph of a young dark-haired man in an Army uniform holding two baby boys. On the back someone had written, Vinnie and the twins, Chicago, 1964.
Dale spent my whole life being the real son and I spent it being the one who looked like Dad, and the truth was that neither of us was Lars Lindqvists by blood.
Our mother told it all, at eighty-nine, at the head of the table where she had sat for sixty years. Before she married Lars, she had twin boys with a man named Vincent Carbone, who went off to serve and did not come back to her. Lars Lindqvist married a woman with two infant sons and raised them both as his own, and never once, in all his years, made either of us feel like anything but his.
Dale had always believed Dad liked him better. It turned out Dad did not play favorites between two boys who were equally not his and equally his entirely. That knocked the wind out of my brother more than the DNA did.
We found Vincent Carbone in Chicago, old now, who had spent decades not knowing his sons had lived. And we kept, more than ever, the name of the hardware man on Superior Street who chose us, both of us, every single day for forty years. Lindqvist. That is who we are.