“And you’re my only bitchy cousin.”

My grandmother just smiled and said, “Well, bless his heart. He gets that from his father’s side.”

That was Bradley. He never learned to cool off. He just got sharper.

Bradley refused to swim because the lake had “fecal coliform counts.” He wouldn’t eat the fried catfish because it was “unnecessarily greasy.” And when I finally got him to sit on the dock with his feet in the water— just his feet —he looked at me and said, with the gravity of a Supreme Court justice, “You know, your accent makes you sound like you have a learning disability.”

“Your oregano is expired,” he announced on his first visit, holding the jar like it was a dead rat. “And the way you store your olive oil next to the stove is degrading the polyphenols.”

I finally snapped at the Christmas Eve dinner when I was seventeen. Bradley had just finished a five-minute monologue about how Southern barbecue was “conceptually inferior to a properly smoked brisket from Kansas City.” He said “conceptually inferior” about my daddy’s pulled pork. My daddy, who had been up since 4 a.m. tending the smoker.

He raised one perfect eyebrow. “Yes?”

We grew up in the sticky, kudzu-choked humidity of central Georgia. He grew up in a gray, tastefully expensive suburb of Boston. And every summer, his parents would ship him down to my grandmother’s farm for two weeks of “family connection.” Those two weeks were my annual descent into hell.

The room went quiet. My mother put her hand on my arm. Bradley just looked at me for a long moment. Then he did something I’d never seen him do.

By high school, he was six feet tall, razor-thin, and had developed a vocabulary specifically designed to make you feel like a piece of lint on his blazer. He went to a boarding school in Connecticut where they apparently taught Latin, crew, and the fine art of condescension. I went to public school in Macon, where I learned how to hotwire a golf cart and make a bong out of a Gatorade bottle. We had nothing to say to each other.

“Because,” he said, “you’re the only people who tell me to shut up to my face.”