Brady’s mother screamed and grabbed him in her arms. She squeezed him, trying to make the piece of apple come out. It didn’t. Frankie’s face went red. She reached into his mouth and down his throat, trying to get at the piece of apple. She couldn’t. Frankie started to lose the red color.

‘Oh-my-dear-Jesus,’ Deborah Ann cried, and ran for the phone. As she picked it up she shouted at Brady, ‘Don’t just sit there like an asshole! Pound him on the back!’

Brady didn’t like to be shouted at, and his mother had never called him an asshole before, but he pounded Frankie on the back. He pounded hard. The piece of apple slice did not come out. Now Frankie’s face was turning blue. Brady had an idea. He picked Frankie up by his ankles so Frankie’s head hung down and his hair brushed the rug. The apple slice did not come out.

‘Stop being a brat, Frankie,’ Brady said.

Frankie continued to breathe – sort of, he was making little breezy whistling noises, anyway – almost until the ambulance got there. Then he stopped. The ambulance men came in. They were wearing black clothes with yellow patches on the jackets. They made Brady go into the kitchen, so Brady didn’t see what they did, but his mother screamed and later he saw drops of blood on the carpet.

No apple slice, though.

Then everyone except Brady went away in the ambulance. He sat on the couch and ate popcorn and watched TV. Not The Blues Brothers; The Blues Brothers was stupid, just a bunch of singing and running around. He found a movie about a crazy guy who kidnapped a bunch of kids who were on their schoolbus. That was pretty exciting.

When the fat sitter showed up, Brady said, ‘Frankie choked on an apple slice. There’s ice cream in the refrigerator. Vanilla Crunch. Have as much as you want.’ Maybe, he thought, if she ate enough ice cream, she’d have a heart attack and he could call nine-one-one.

Or just let the stupid bitch lay there. That would probably be better. He could watch her.

Deborah Ann finally came home at eleven o’clock. The fat sitter had made Brady go to bed, but he wasn’t asleep, and when he came downstairs in his pj’s, his mother hugged him to her. The fat babysitter asked how Frankie was. The fat babysitter was full of fake concern. The reason Brady knew it was fake was because he wasn’t concerned, so why would the fat babysitter care?

‘He’s going to be fine,’ Deborah Ann said, with a big smile. Then, when the fat babysitter was gone, she started crying like crazy. She got her wine out of the refrigerator, but instead of pouring it into a glass, she drank straight from the neck of the bottle.

‘He might not be,’ she told Brady, wiping wine from her chin. ‘He’s in a coma. Do you know what that is?’

‘Sure. Like in a doctor show.’

‘That’s right.’ She got down on one knee, so they were face-to-face. Having her so close – smelling the perfume she’d put on for the date that never happened – gave him a feeling in his stomach. It was funny but good. He kept looking at the blue stuff on her eyelids. It was weird but good.

‘He stopped breathing for a long time before the EMTs could make some room for the air to go down. The doctor at the hospital said that even if he comes out of his coma, there might be brain damage.’

Brady thought Frankie was already brain-damaged – he was awful stupid, carrying around that fire truck all the time – but said nothing. His mother was wearing a blouse that showed the tops of her titties. That gave him a funny feeling in his stomach, too.

‘If I tell you something, do you promise never to tell anyone? Not another living soul?’

Brady promised. He was good at keeping secrets.

‘It might be better if he does die. Because if he wakes up and he’s brain-damaged, I don’t know what we’ll do.’

Then she clasped him to her and her hair tickled the side of his face and the smell of her perfume was very strong. She said: ‘Thank God it wasn’t you, honeyboy. Thank God for that.’

Brady hugged her back, pressing his chest against her titties. He had a boner.

Frankie did wake up, and sure enough, he was brain-damaged. He had never been smart (‘Takes after his father,’ Deborah Ann said once), but compared to the way he was now, he had been a genius in those pre-apple slice days. He had toilet-trained late, not until he was almost three and a half, and now he was back in diapers. His vocabulary had been reduced to no more than a dozen words. Instead of walking he made his way around the house in a limping shuffle. Sometimes he fell abruptly and profoundly asleep, but that was only in the daytime. At night, he had a tendency to wander, and before he started out on these nocturnal safaris, he usually stripped off his Pampers. Sometimes he got into bed with his mother. More often he got in with Brady, who would awake to find the bed soaked and Frankie staring at him with goofy, creepy love.

Frankie had to keep going to the doctor. His breathing was never right. At its best it was a wet wheeze, at its worst, when he had one of his frequent colds, a rattling bark. He could no longer eat solid food; his meals had to be pureed in the blender and he ate them in a highchair. Drinking from a glass was out of the question, so it was back to sippy cups.

The boyfriend from the bank was long gone, and the fat babysitter didn’t last, either. She said she was sorry, but she just couldn’t cope with Frankie the way he was now. For a while Deborah Ann got a full-time home care lady to come in, but the home care lady ended up getting more money than Deborah Ann made at the beauty shop, so she let the home care lady go and quit her job. Now they were living off savings. She began to drink more, switching from wine to vodka, which she called a more efficient delivery system. Brady would sit with her on the couch, drinking Pepsi. They would watch Frankie crawl around on the carpet with his fire truck in one hand and his blue sippy cup, also filled with Pepsi, in the other.

‘It’s shrinking like the icecaps,’ Deborah Ann would say, and Brady no longer had to ask her what it was. ‘And when it’s gone, we’ll be out on the street.’

She went to see a lawyer (in the same strip mall where Brady would years later flick an annoying goofy-boy in the throat) and paid a hundred dollars for a consultation. She took Brady with her. The lawyer’s name was Greensmith. He wore a cheap suit and kept sneaking glances at Deborah Ann’s titties.

‘I can tell you what happened,’ he said. ‘Seen it before. That piece of apple left just enough space around his windpipe to let him keep breathing. It’s too bad you reached down his throat, that’s all.’

‘I was trying to get it out!’ Deborah Ann said indignantly.

‘I know, any good mother would do the same, but you pushed it deeper instead, and blocked his windpipe entirely. If one of the EMTs had done that, you’d have a case. Worth a few hundred thousand at least. Maybe a million-five. Seen it before. But it was you. And you told them what you did. Didn’t you?’

Deborah Ann admitted she had.

‘Did they intubate him?’

Deborah Ann said they did.

‘Okay, that’s your case. They got an airway into him, but in doing so, they pushed that bad apple in even deeper.’ He sat back, spread his fingers on his slightly yellowed white shirt, and peeped at Deborah Ann’s titties again, maybe just to make sure they hadn’t slipped out of her bra and run away. ‘Hence, brain damage.’

‘So you’ll take the case?’

‘Happy to, if you can pay for the five years it’ll drag through the courts. Because the hospital and their insurance providers will fight you every step of the way. Seen it before.’

‘How much?’

Greensmith named a figure, and Deborah Ann left the office, holding Brady’s hand. They sat in her Honda (then new) and she cried. When that part was over, she told him to play the radio while she ran another errand. Brady knew what the other errand entailed: a bottle of efficient delivery system.