When we were kids, Alex’s house was so perfectly suburban it almost unnerved me: ranch style, white-shuttered, filled with clubby wood cabinetry and Bev Doolittle landscapes in which patterns of sandstone boulders resolved, if you stared hard enough, into the noble profiles of Native American chiefs. My own family’s house was bizarre, a novelty constructed on the model of a Scottish castle in the yard of an eccentric Texas real-estate tycoon who had intended it for use as a guesthouse, complete with turret and crenellated rampart walls. My brother and sisters and I lived there beholden to nothing but our own imaginations, as if in one of the children’s fantasy novels our mom read aloud as librarian at our elementary school. Television was forbidden. Going to Uncle Norm’s on the Fourth of July for the traditional Blum family barbecue was like going back to America. There were burnished hunks of chicken so greasy they turned our paper plates transparent, glasses of iced lemonade so sweet they made us squint, fireworks so loud they blasted craters in our eardrums. In the living room was one of those massive, shrieking kaleidoscopes of culture that we affected to disdain but actually coveted desperately: TV, TV, TV. Aunt Laura, her straw-haired, clothing-catalog looks undercut by the Jersey burr in her voice, always baked a cake in the likeness of the American flag. She used raspberries for the stripes, blueberries for the stars. Alex and I would hug with brisk indifference and then make our separate beelines to the food, just another pairing in the awkwardly prolonged combinatorial explosion of cousins that preceded every Blum family get-together.
When it came my turn to deliver my annual life update to Uncle Norm, I’d barely manage to get through the background material he would have to learn first in order to understand my latest mathematical factoid before he would clap me on the back, call me a genius for the umpteenth time, and edge toward the yard for Frisbee. Hey, I wanted to call out, this stuff’s actually relevant to your life! The arc of a throw is a parabola! Gyroscopic precession keeps the Frisbee level! Instead I sat on the patio with the aunts and watched my father and my uncles hurl, pound, swing, bat, and kick Norm’s vast array of athletic gear around the yard like hairy-chested mammals in some kind of toy-rich zoo enclosure. I thought I could perceive slight gradations of personality in the shapes of their bald heads. My dad’s was flattest on top, like a musk ox or a walrus, some animal that settled doubt with impact. Uncle Fred’s was roundest, a meditative egg that harmonized with his warm, smooth baritone, beard, and gentle belly. Uncle Norm’s, the smallest and pointiest of the three, was a guided missile that zipped around threatening at any moment to target you for something “fun.” All three had segued from the total athletic dominance of their childhood and college years into gracefully attenuated adult versions of same. A third uncle generally watched from the patio: Kurt, whose wavy brown mullet and mustache broke my system entirely. His jokes were menacing in a way hard to understand as a child, as if the punchline might turn out to be him smacking you in the face and laughing uproariously in his gritty, smoked-out bellow. The Blum brothers bought, sold, managed, and brokered real estate, occasionally collaborating on what were only ever described to us as “deals.” I preferred conversing with my mother, a more appreciative audience for my spiritualized glosses on chaos theory.
My cousins weren’t all like my uncles. Alex’s older brother, Max, was shaping up to be an intellectual loner with a sarcastic sense of humor, and Sam and Carly, their younger brother and sister, followed at Alex’s heels like shy puppies, heads bent close together, talking in hushed and dreamy tones. But Alex himself was a Blum straight from his father’s mold: cheerful, confident, alarmingly muscular for a preteen, already fluent in that jocular male banter I had always felt so alienated by, quick to snag a disk out of the air and flip it back with a grin on his way inside to watch TV.
When Norm and I first met to talk about the robbery, I had already been interviewing Alex about his story for six months. I was twenty-eight years old and inching toward a new direction in life, teaching writing workshops at an elementary school in New York City as part of a fellowship at an MFA program and feeling more and more like a grown-up journalist, but being taken out to lunch by my uncle was an exercise in instant regression.
“Hey, handsome!” he said, rubbing his fist into my hair and corralling me toward his black Saab. I was in Denver for two weeks, staying with my mother. Climbing into the passenger seat felt like boarding a roller coaster. Norm accelerated with a smooth, important hum up the on-ramp to Interstate 25, a stretch of highway as ubiquitous in trips through Denver as paintings of stallions rearing up against the sunset are in the steakhouses, stadiums, and sports bars where you inevitably end up. After learning that I had been commuting from Brooklyn to Manhattan on a bike, he grilled me about my helmet usage, then segued into a long, funny tale of sweating each morning through his only two suits, heavy wool Salvation Army castoffs from my dad, while biking to his own first job in Denver in the ’70s. Both of us seemed relieved at having found this common ground.
“These things,” Norm said, chuckling, “were like horse blankets.”
He brought the car and the anecdote to perfect simultaneous conclusions in a restaurant parking lot, ushered me through the front door with a cheerful wave at the hostess, and obliged our teenaged waitress to laugh three times with embarrassed pleasure at all his hammy compliments to her fine memory and good taste as she told us about the specials. It occurred to me that Norm was just the way Alex would be if you added thirty years and removed the distorting influences of a bank robbery and a prison term: relentlessly fun, impenetrably cheerful, quick to dispatch all troubling ambiguities with chummy cliché. He ordered the Cobb salad. I went with the spinach calzone. We watched the waitress walk away in silence. Norm’s aura of energetic fun collapsed with startling suddenness.
“Okay,” he said. “This gets very complex with the dynamics of the family.”
By then the differences I saw between my uncles were no longer just geometric. Stories had accumulated on those bald domes, constellations among the pockmarks and divots. Norm, I knew now, had been the chubby, guileless runt of the family, an unplanned addition born two years after their only sister, Judy. Around the house they had called him “Stump.” His older brothers once managed to convince him that ears could be trained to wiggle if you practiced enough. Norm worked for years on his jaw pops and clenched eyebrows before shifting his energies to hundreds of sit-ups, push-ups, wind sprints, and squats every morning before the school bus came, striving his whole childhood to match Dad’s accomplishments as a high school football star and eventually exceeding them in both hockey and baseball long after anyone was paying attention. By the time Norm was checking wingmen against the boards for the State University of New York, his brothers were hitchhiking west to the dirtbag mountain towns of Colorado for a lost decade of carpentering, ski bumming, low-level pot smoking, and high-level beardedness. When Norm finally graduated, in 1979, and biked two thousand miles in three weeks to join them, they had already descended en masse to Denver, shaved, gotten into real estate, and surprised themselves by making more money than they knew what to do with. Dad picked up his littlest brother outside town in the yellow Toyota that he and Mom called the “rust bucket” and threw his bike into the backseat. He had a room waiting to rent to Norm in a drafty house he’d just bought on Gilpin Street, some friendly local millionaires to introduce him to, and one of those Salvation Army suits for him to wear to an interview at Coldwell Banker, the firm where he himself had gotten started before striking out on his own.
Norm worked there for eighteen years, through a leveraged buyout and two name changes. Dad never quite let go of his rebellious mountain hippie streak, wearing bright orange skater shoes to business meetings and referring in private to the imaginationless investors of his daily working life as “glompers,” but Norm went full native, surrounding