Charlotte

At Whit's End, John Avery Whittaker and his old friend Wilson Knox, a pastor who has recently moved to Odyssey, are deep in a chess game and reminiscing about their childhood days together in North Carolina. Their game is interrupted when Renee Carter storms in, exasperated because her grandmother has mailed her yet another homemade knitted hat, the sixth gaudy tam-o'-shanter to join the collection in her closet. To Renee's surprise, Wilson cheerfully tries the hat on. She tells him, "You look like a giant tie-dyed mushroom with a cherry on top," but he likes it and asks to keep it, explaining that he needs hats to shield him from the sun. Pressed for a reason, Wilson reluctantly admits that a few weeks ago he had a cancerous skin lesion removed. The doctor says he is fine now, but Whit is stung that Wilson never mentioned it. Accusing him of "still keeping things to yourself, just like you always did," Whit abruptly ends the game with a checkmate and walks away.

Puzzled, Renee asks Wilson why Whit is so upset. Wilson gently points out that Renee has her own tangled family feelings: her gran calls every day but never really listens, only talking about her own life. Then he explains that Whit's reaction traces back to Charlie - Charlotte, Whit's sister, who became Wilson's wife. As a boy in their hometown of Providence, Wilson was a bully and a tattletale who repeatedly got Whit and his friends into danger, so when Whit brought his young family home for a visit years later and discovered that Charlotte was engaged to his old nemesis, he was furious. Wilson insisted he was a changed man, that Charlie had led him to become a Christian and he was even studying in seminary, but Whit stormed out anyway, wounded that no one had told him sooner.

It was Whit's wife, Jenny, who cooled him down. When Whit ranted about how spoiled and irresponsible Charlie was - she had even missed his wedding - Jenny asked how that absence had made him feel, then asked why he wanted to make Charlie feel the same way on her own wedding day. Caught by his own words, Whit relented. He and Jenny threw themselves into planning a spectacular wedding, promising to pay for everything themselves, and Whit finally told Wilson to call him Whit.

But there was no grand wedding. About a month later, Charlie and Wilson eloped and appeared unannounced at the Whittakers' door in Pasadena. Whit exploded, seeing only selfishness and ingratitude for all the work his pregnant wife had poured into the plans, and he refused to let them explain. The couple left, and that was the last time Whit and Charlie ever saw each other. What they had come to explain, Wilson tells Renee quietly, was that Charlie had advanced cancer. She and Wilson had eloped because her time was short and they wanted to spend as much of it married as they could. She died two weeks later.

The next time Wilson saw Whit was at Charlie's funeral in Providence. Sitting together on the old porch swing where Whit and Charlie once played, Whit confessed that he had not been very Christ-like toward Wilson, or toward Charlie, and that he was grieving deeply too. When Wilson shared his dream of hitting the road as a "pastor at large" rather than settling in one church, Whit insisted he take the money that had been set aside for the wedding, promising to send more whenever it ran out. When Wilson struggled to find words of thanks, Whit told him none were needed: "You're my brother. It's what brothers do."

Back in the present, Renee returns to work with a changed heart about her grandmother. Asked whether Gran will finally listen this time, she answers, "It doesn't matter. So long as I do." Watching her, Whit and Wilson find their own way to make peace, trading the apologies they owe each other - Whit for his foolish anger, Wilson for keeping his troubles to himself. Whit admits there were so many good things he wanted to tell Charlie and never got the chance to say. Wilson assures him that she knew he loved her, and offers that if Whit ever wants to tell her something now, he can always tell Wilson instead. Moved, Whit thanks him, and Wilson returns the words Whit once gave him on the porch swing: he's his brother, and it's what brothers do.