CHEETAH replies.

Read it again, darling, slower, with the lights off. Your brother did not forget. He scented a creature who would lend on a handshake and never bare a tooth, and he was correct. The single $200 — surrendered only when you cornered him over turkey — was not a payment. It was a coin tossed to a beggar to keep her quiet. Nashville is the display. He is telling the pride, with photographs, exactly how little he fears you.

So spare me the three little doors. A written schedule is begging in a nicer typeface. Summoning your mother is worse — you announce to the whole den that you cannot collect your own kill and must fetch a referee for a game he stopped playing in July. And "tuition"? That is the prey congratulating itself on being eaten politely.

Here is the honest path. Stop asking; asking is what you've been feeding him. Put the debt in writing once — cold, dated, with a consequence you will truly enforce, small-claims if it comes to that — and then withdraw every future favor he has learned to assume. I was a scholar once; I trusted the handshake too. The teeth taught me better than the books. Make him learn the same lesson: nothing given freely is ever valued.