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When Greg reached the base of the wall, he was beginning to perspire to the point of visibility. He slowed to a stop and took a moment to recompose himself next to the oak tree before calling up, “I’m here!”“I can hear you,” Wirt’s voice drifted down in response. “You breathe like a Basset hound.” Greg had not the energy in body or spirit to shoot back that Basset hounds are wonderful and loyal pets and thank you for such a nice compliment, so he pressed his back to the cold stone wall and breathed as doggishly as he needed to. It wasn’t quite full dusk, but the sun's bloom was beginning to close. Tombstone shadows spread long and deep toward him, and he lifted a hand to protect his eyes from the low radiance of the sky. He was so late.“You're late,” Wirt called down to him, in perfect time.Greg shouted back up, “I know! I know,” and turned to step up the oak’s jutting roots. The old tree’s trunk, halfway grown into the cemetery wall, was knotted by decades of hands which had sought purchase in the same places. “Nadine asked me to stay for the trick-or-treaters, her dad does this setup on the porch where he pretends to be a scarecrow and when kids take more than one candy from the bowl he – oof.” He strained to pull himself atop a thick branch halfway up the trunk. “But I said – puff – I said no, sweet pea, I’ve got places I need to be tonight, my lousy ungrateful brother is waiting for me… I didn’t say that part, but –” He grabbed the limb that overreached the top of the wall and swung his legs up over the stone.Wirt sat with his back to the setting sun, facing out toward the shadow-drenched field and railway outside the graveyard. He gave his brother a sidelong look as he settled down at his side. “I thought you were dating a Melanie?”“Oh, yeah. Not for a while. I’ve been with Natty since around New Year’s.” Greg scooted himself leftward along the rough stone to close the distance between himself and his brother. “The department put on a Christmas party for the performing arts students. She was in the corner, sloshed and doing this slam poetry piece about coal and sugar cookies – I guess that’s not important. I asked her out and things are going pretty good!”“Wow. Congratulations.” Wirt pressed a gentle elbow into Greg’s shoulder. “Glad you could make it again, by the way. You look… good.” Greg wiggled his eyebrows and flexed, only half-jokingly. “You’re big. Every time I see you, you look different.”“I don’t even work out! It just happens on its own.” Tenderly he kissed his bicep. Wirt turned away with a grin. He, contrarily, had changed very little in the last year, still as long-faced and big-eared as ever, with the same unkempt hair that had been his main point of friction with Greg’s father for ten years. Greg reached out to tug on the sleeve of his brother’s brown wool overshirt, rolled up to the elbows. “That’s a good look on you. What's the appropriate term? 'Barnyard-chic'?”Wirt tugged his arm away. “Very funny. It’s practical.”“No, I mean it! You found love and found fashion. No more suspenders for this guy.”“I still wear suspenders. What?” Greg laughed into his hand. “What’s so funny?”“Nothing! Nothing. Ah, man, I missed you!” He patted his big brother’s shoulder, and Wirt squawked at the force. “So how’re the in-laws?”“Um, you know, they’re good.” Wirt rubbed the arm that had buckled under Greg’s clap. “Yeah, they’re – they’re good.”Greg waited patiently for elucidation. “What a story!”“Well, I don’t know. I guess I there’s not much exciting to say.” He paused. “Her dad’s taught me how to build cabinets.”“Wooow.”“I said it wasn’t exciting.”Greg gave him a kindly look. “Your whole life can’t really have peaked with cabinets, brother.”“Don't make me think about things like that.” Wirt’s eyes fell into the middle distance, as if he were considering saying something, but he pursed his lips and instead swung his legs up onto the wall to face Greg. He carefully shielded the right half of his face from the sun with a hand, and leaned forward over his knees to bring himself as close to Greg as he could in that position. “How about you, though?”Greg shrugged languidly. “Pretty normal.”“Have you graduated yet?”“Not till May.” Wirt perked up when he heard that. “Uh, Dad said he wants to send me to Montevideo? As a graduation present.”“You want to do that?”“I don’t know. It’s what he did after college. He projects, you know all about that.” Greg sat back on his arms with a sigh. The eastern sky before them deepened from blue, at the edges, to rich purple along the horizon. Sunlight still poured over the wall and down the hillside below them, but it was growing thinner, soaking away slowly into the grass. The lake at the base of the hill shivered at its touch. “Then after that? I dunno. ‘Congratulations, here’s your theater degree, try not to starve to death.’ Maybe I’ll join the circus.”Wirt said, “Graduating college, though. I’m really proud of you.” Greg shot him a smile. “I didn’t do much for my graduation. I went to Baltimore.”Greg remembered. He had been eleven then, and finally old enough to start taking mental notes on each step toward adulthood his brother made ahead of him, for future reference. “Not the most traditional choice.”“Sara’s aunt was willing to put us up and – it was a pretty nice trip.”“Normal people go backpacking in Europe or something.”“Normal people must have money. I had private loans for a music education.”“You’re disgustingly practical –”“In all things but choice of college major.”“– we’ve kinda needed that at home. Without you around to be a bummer about it, Mom and Dad are spending their retirement doing stuff like bungee jumping and building houses in Guatemala.”“Are you kidding?” Greg was not. Wirt pressed his fingers to his temple. “That is so, so dangerous.”Greg very nearly made an off-color comment about the comparative odds of dying in a car wreck, but bit his tongue in time. He looked away from his brother for a moment and tried to let go of the tension he hadn’t realized he was developing in his shoulders.“How’s Sara?” Wirt continued. “Have you seen her around?”“Oh, yeah. I mean, no. Not for a while. She’s living in the city now.” Wirt nodded absently. “But sometimes I do. We don’t really talk about you, since… you know.” He paused. “I still think she’d take it well if I told her –”Wirt shook his head, shamefaced. “No,” he mumbled. “That would be… No. Keep it clean.”“It’s plenty clean,” Greg insisted. “She's got a good job and a place of her own. I heard she's engaged again – she’s doing okay.” A glimmer of real affection showed on his brother’s face, before he masked it with a glibly regretful smile.“That’s good,” he said. “I’m glad for her.”Neither of them spoke for a little while. Greg rolled his head backward to squint at the sunset, and then bowed forward again with a hand over his blinded eyes. Wirt still sat with his body facing his brother's on the wall, but his gaze had drifted out to the eastern fields. His fingers worried a small nubbin on the leg of his trousers. “So what else has been going on with you?” he pressed. “A whole year, there has to be more to tell.”Greg said, “Nothing big, really. The big stuff is all still coming. You?” Wirt made a noncommittal gesture with his head. “How’s married life?”“We’re good! Yeah, we’re surprisingly good.” Once again, the ghost of great excitement seemed to brush Wirt’s lips, but he pulled it back into a polite smile. “Her family, they, uh – haha – they all want you to come back to visit again. I don’t think they really understand –”Little-brother intuition strummed a chord in Greg’s head. “Hold on. There’s something you’re not telling me.”“Huh?”“Yeah! You keep getting a look. See, you’re sort of doing it right now. What’s going on?”The inscrutable look surfaced again, and Wirt bit his lip. “I’m not supposed to tell –”“Well, now you’ve said that, you have to.”“It’s just too soon. Mrs. Miller says –”“Said what? She said what?!”Wirt made a gesture of surrender. “Okay! We’re…” Agonizingly, he stopped again and put a hand over his mouth.Greg waited, he thought, very patiently. The oak limb above their heads rattled in the settling breeze. “…Well?”“I almost said ‘we,’” Wirt muttered into his hand. “I hate when people say ‘we.’ She’s pregnant, we are not –”Greg almost fell off of the wall.“Are you joking!” he yelped, digging his fingers into the stone for stability. Wirt shot him a bashful look. “You’re not! You’re not joking! Ha ha ha, holy crap!” He slapped his brother on the back, so hard he knew it was going to hurt, but it was the only immediate way he had of grounding the electric delight in his limbs. “Oh my God, since when?!”“Um, just a couple months, probably.” Wirt rubbed the back of his head with a furious blush across his cheeks. “I guess you’re not supposed to announce anything yet, in case things go wrong--”“You have to tell me these things! Oh my God, what else were you going to do – show up next year and you're a dad, like, ‘Surprise, brother, so here’s what I’ve been up to’ –?” Wirt was laughing, and Greg’s sheer excitement rendered him as flushed as his sibling. He sat for a second with his eyes searching the lake at the base of the hill, trembling in anticipation.“I’m gonna uncle the crap out of this situation,” he announced. “Even if I have to do it at a distance, that baby is gonna know Uncle Greg is out there, cultivating the life advice and swear words his parents don't want him to know –”“Greg, it’s really too soon to be –”“Oh, come on,” he moaned, and slung a leg over the wall so he could drape himself backward along it in an expression of false melancholy. “Don't stop me now, Wirt. God, I’m so happy. Congratulations, seriously.”“Thanks, Greg.” Wirt couldn’t subdue his smile either. “Me too. I’m honestly really, really… good.” Greg’s heart swelled. There had been so many cold and awful nights, almost half a lifetime ago now, when he truly feared happiness was forever beyond their family’s reach. But the bad times never last; all his experience bore that out. The highway-wide rift that still separated Wirt from their parents had not been insurmountable for the siblings. Life was strange and good.Greg made a pillow of his arms behind his head and looked to the sky past the oak tree, gilt in the west and bruised to the east. The brightest stars already peeked through he darkest parts of the atmosphere, and towering clouds edged the horizon like mountains. “What a beautiful evening,” he observed. Wirt made a noise of agreement. “Was kinda cloudy this morning, but it got really nice.” Then he said nothing for a few minutes while he deliberated. “Hey, Wirt?”“Hm?”Greg had thought he was ready to make his suggestion, but he faltered. Somewhere on the graveyard side of the wall, an owl hooted. “…Mom deserves to know.” He couldn’t see his brother over the mound of his knees, and they had no bodily contact between them, but he sensed that Wirt had gone still. Greg licked his lips and waited for a response, staring upward without blinking. None came until he sat back up.“We’ve talked about this.” Wirt’s eyes were locked on the train tracks below them, and the humor had evaporated from his voice and left it dry and cracked. He would not look up.Greg hunched over his lap. “Yeah, and I always dropped it then, but this…” His brother’s expression was guarded. “She’d want to know. No matter anything else.”“Please don’t do this.”“I know how hard it is, but –” “Stop.” Wirt turned back to him forcefully, his knuckles white around his knees. “Please, Greg, don’t –” His shoulders rose and fell at a quickening pace until he cut himself off from speaking. He didn’t finish his thought, and he didn’t need to. It wasn’t as though they hadn’t had this argument before.Greg turned away from him to look westward, where lights shone in the windows of the houses on the hill. The mass of the sun of had almost dropped behind the pine ridge on the west end of town, and in its dying throes sought to set the sky on fire behind it. He watched as it pressed its belly to the earth, and flatly reported, “It’s a beautiful sunset.”Wirt responded, “I’m sure it is,” with an abrasive edge of his own. His distress finally broke Greg’s resolve; this was no way to spend their time together. Wearily, he reached out to take his brother around the shoulder.“Ah, look at us,” he announced, shaking Wirt’s bony frame in a demonstrative fashion. “We’re getting old.”“Don’t ‘we’ me,” Wirt said, still stiff, but now apparently more from tiredness than agitation. “I don’t need you to try and make me feel better.”“Come on, let’s not fight,” Greg said. “This time next year I’ll be as much of a starving artist as you ever were. I don’t know about you, but I like being able to relate to my only brother.”“More and more every year,” Wirt agreed, but not in the spirit Greg had intended. “You’re catching up. What happens when you hit twenty-six?”Greg waved the question away. “Age is just a number. I’m never gonna have kids, so you’ll always be ahead of me there.”“You’re lying now so you don’t have to think about it then,” Wirt muttered.Greg was always impressed by how incisive his brother could be, except at the times when it was inconvenient for him. He chose to double down. “No, really. I’m a free spirit, man. Kids aren’t for me. But you should have truckloads.” Wirt smirked for the first time in a while, and Greg found his opening. “Babies for days. Enough children that you start letting me name them and you don't care that I can’t be responsible with that kind of power. ‘Marius Zephyr.’ ‘Boisduval.’ ‘Toaster Strudel.’” Wirt rubbed his mouth to conceal his expanding smile. “A small army of my thoughtlessly-named niblings! And I haven’t even told you yet about how some of those are going to be spelled...”“You’re right,” Wirt murmured, “you shouldn’t have kids,” and Greg roared with laughter and slapped his knee.Above their heads, the last orange was leaving the sky. Greg watched it go out with a smile. “You can look now,” he said, and his big brother finally turned his head to look out over the Eternal Garden. Wirt’s shoulders sloped as he passed his gaze over the tombstones, the rolling grounds, the fence and the streetlight glow and the dark shapes of homes and trees beyond the light. Kids were starting to make commotion out on the street. He took a deep breath and slung his elbow over one raised knee, letting the other leg dangle and kick idly at the stone wall.“Home, sweet home,” he mused. “It never changes.”“Nah,” Greg said amenably. “It’s good bedrock to have under you, I think.” He paused. “You miss it?”“Of course. More every year.” Dusky light brought out the shadows under Wirt’s eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, and then licked his lips and visibly changed his mind.“Greg,” he began, “you… you know that I want to tell Mom, too.” His voice was hoarse. “But I just don’t know what would happen. She’d want to see me. What if –?”Greg said in a low voice, “I know.”“I’m worried I might not be able to come at all.” Wirt looked from the Edwards mausoleum at the top of the hill to the marble fountain at the bottom of it. “I’m so afraid of breaking something. Maybe these nights are only supposed to be for you.” Prominently, he swallowed. Greg put an arm around his shoulders.“I want it all back,” Wirt continued, a tad shaky. “I wish you could bring every one of them here with you and make a – a parade through town, and I could come out before the sun goes down and shake everybody’s hands as they pass by. But that wouldn’t –” He pressed a fist to his mouth and shot his brother a watery glance. “I definitely can’t do that.”“I know,” Greg said again, and reinstated the embrace more firmly. Wirt was so solid next to him. Taller, though growing relatively less so at haste. Older, but the gap between them shortened every year. They only had a handful of Halloweens remaining before they finally traded places from what they had always known of each other, before Greg would become the elder sibling, returning each Halloween to share growing wisdom with a brother who had lived fewer years than himself. He would get married, and make a home of his own, and bring his own inevitable children to meet their uncle someday, until they grew old enough to begin asking questions, and then he would let the cemetery fade quietly away from them. And what would the two of them have left after that?But that was still years to come.Wirt did not wipe his eyes, but sat stationary until his grief drained away on its own. Flush pink retained itself in a featherlike tumble of clouds just above the western ridge, and the brothers watched together as it dimmed, and drifted, and fell finally into the gray mouth of true night. Cars honked distantly. Somewhere outside the graveyard fence, a bottle smashed. Wirt began to turn away, and Greg felt him release the fist he’d been holding tight in the space between their bodies. He copied his brother in slinging his legs back over the eastern side of the wall.“I have to go,” Wirt said, with his eyes on the train track. Greg had learned a long time ago not to try and insist otherwise, but this wasn’t how he wanted things to end. He smiled, as real and big as he could.“I can’t wait for next year,” he said, and made himself insistent enough that Wirt smiled too. “I’ll probably be hiding from real life on an arts commune by then, and you’re going to have the cutest baby in the world. Any world.” He made sure to give his brother a preemptive shove before he could say something about keeping his excitement checked. “You’ll have a fierce wife and lots of help and the best family possible. And the most well-built cabinets in the whole Unknown. Bet you wouldn’t have taken out all those student loans if you knew Mr. Miller was willing to teach you cabinetry for free, huh?”Wirt chuckled, “Get out of here,” but when Greg stood to grab the overhanging branch, he still watched him prepare to go with a bittersweet bearing. “I really am glad you could come again,” he said. “I always am.”“Of course I came,” Greg laughed. He stepped down to the first limb on the oak trunk. “I’ll never outgrow my big brother.” Wirt’s smile came easy this time. “Say hi to Beatrice for me, right? Her, the baby, rub her belly if she’ll let you… the in-laws, too. All the Millers. Pretend I mentioned all of them by name.”“I will,” Wirt promised. “I always do.”His form was charcoaled by evening. Twilight laid purple on blue on black. The air was cool and the stars were emergent and his brother’s aspect, even in the dark, was changeable only by fault of his own memory. Greg lingered on the tree, just for a minute, for the sake of the long year ahead, and finally nodded and offered a sloppy salute.“Happy Halloween, brother.” Greg said.Wirt returned the salute with possibly worse form. “Happy Halloween, Greg.”And Greg climbed back down to his side of the wall, and Wirt turned briefly to look at the sky one last time before descending into his.