The first brother is golden-haired, golden-everythinged. He is the youngest when he leaves and so he stays the most whole, the most wholesome, fit for a field of other whole and wholesome stalks of wheat. The mother is allergic to bread. Wheat remains unground, unmixed, unbaked, unswallowed. Lovable.

It’s different with Cave. Cave gets acne pits where Wheat gets none. Cave furrows his brow, desperate to locate himself in books. Not stories, mind you, and not the poems that Wheat will chase. Cave reads Exodus. Aquinas. The founding fathers. Cave is no one’s favorite, which is fine, which is suffering to offer up. Cave, the philosopher, paces for hours. He walks and he walks but Cave never walks outside of himself.

While serious, Cave can be funny. Or find things funny. And once he finds them, funny things ricochet around inside of him for years and years. When he calls from Texas, the mother passes the phone around to all of the sisters. By the time Eyes gets a turn, she can hear that Cave has turned on the television for company. He spends most of the conversation quoting old Saturday Night Live sketches from back when Saturday Night Live was still good. Chris Farley and his van down by the river. Jerry Seinfeld asking What’s the deal with Grape Nuts? No grapes, no nuts.

Cave likes movies, too, and brings home several used tapes from the video rental place where his best friend works. Cave’s friend is a sweet boy with Ethel Merman pipes who plays Snoopy in the high school production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Pipes wears a white turtleneck, has sharp features, dies young. Cave is Schroeder, stripes and a tiny piano. When Pipes comes out to Cave, Cave covers his ears and says la la la.

There is a VHS recording of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which Eyes watches over and over. She loves that Charlie Brown is always called by his whole name. She loves that he is bald and a boy and a man and also good. She loves that Lucy teaches her brother that snow comes up out of the ground, like flowers, and that it only looks like it’s coming down because the wind blows it around. Loves that Linus believes her.

The tape is lined up among Cave’s other tapes. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Revenge of the Nerds. Rock ‘n Roll High School. The Naked Gun. Airplane. Also, Shredded Wheat.

Shredded Wheat is the name of Cave and Pipes’ cover band. They make one music video of one song, Fleetwood Mac’s "Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." Cave plays piano, and even though he is no imposing figure, the piano seems too small. He hunches over the instrument, tense in his shoulders, never a gentle touch. The piano is inadequate, letting him down, and the only thing he knows how to do is to play it harder. Someday, sometimes, this is how he will parent his five children. But at sixteen, he’s just a kid in a band. And when the video starts, there are four pieces of Shredded Wheat cereal set against a white wall. In the next shot, the Shredded Wheat has disappeared, has been replaced with four teenage boys, who believe what they believe. Who think only of right now, this moment making them whole.