Bittersweet Fruit

You just don't get along, for reasons that may or may not be clear. Burned far too often, you decide it's not worth pursuing a real connection. Then something happens, whether it's a crisis or the simple recognition that time is getting short, and you decide to make one last attempt.

"You get to a point," Brenner says, "where you really want to be a team with your family."

With both parents gone, her brother had no other family left. But Carl was no team player.

Brenner likes to call him "the Howard Roark of fruit," referring to the hyper-individualistic architect in Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" (Gary Cooper played him in the movie). A trial attorney who gave up the law at 35 to start raising apples and pears, Carl was the kind of man who, while away from San Antonio tending his orchards in Washington state, chose to hole up in a $45 motel room rather than deal with the complications of condo ownership. His gifts of holiday pears would be preceded by a barrage of imperious instructions about how to handle them:

Are you going to be home between two p.m. and four p.m. on Friday? . . . You have to be there. The fruit is coming. It must go into the refrigerator immediately.

Brenner, meanwhile, had defined her adult self by leaving Texas for New York.

"I want to be a writer," she told a fiance.

"You'll make a great hostess," the soon-to-be-jettisoned fellow said.

To support herself, she sold Italian ices from a cart in Central Park. A story called "Confessions of a Pushcart Peddler" launched a journalism career that led her to magazines like the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, where today she is a writer-at-large. She is the kind of successful heartland exile who long ago took on the protective coloration of her new environment, be it the obligatory black fashion statements or the habitual brashness with which Manhattanites arm themselves for urban combat.

Over lunch at a deli near Madison Square Garden, Brenner talks about the culture clash Carl feared when she visited him in apple country. "My brother kept trying to explain to me: 'They don't do hyperbole here,' " she says. " 'They're not going to like your personality. Washington state people just talk straight, without all the New York stuff.' "

Their personal clashes went back to their San Antonio youth.

Carl was 3 when she was born. His "first official welcoming act," she writes, was to push her out a first-floor window and send her to the emergency room.