Howie Jackson rushes from Detroit to Washington, D.C., when his brother Hank is hospitalized with pneumonia. He must cope with Hank's illness along with facing his own prejudices. The following summer he becomes part of his brother's mostly gay community, as he cares for Hank and tries to re-establish an almost broken closeness with his twin.

This little story has a freshness and immediacy due to being told in the first person, present tense, and vividly evokes an era before mobile phones, when AIDS was still a fatal illness.