He doesn't remember his parents, but he has enough pictures given to him and stories told that he doesn't feel too bad about it, all things considered. He has Wendy and Abel to look after him, so it hurts less and less as time goes by, until he's old enough to understand things and Wendy tells him the full story of their father, and then all he feels is crushing disappointment and anger. Disappointment, because he had though that his parents were good people, and anger because he sees what that knowledge does to his brother. He doesn't say anything, he's not sure what there is to say, but he tries to help however he can.
He's twelve years old when he realises that while Wendy is good people and cares about them, she only makes things worse inside Abel's head. Abel remembers more than he does, has memories about what their parents were actually like, and he knows that his older brother looks like a carbon copy of their father while he starts to look more and more like their mother. It crushes him when he comes home from school one day to Wendy at the kitchen table, where she tells him that Abel is gone and didn't stick around to say goodbye.
The weekly phone calls become his lifeline, all that's left of the older brother that he still admires. They always start with Abel's rough voice calling him nerd, affectionately the way he always had, and he cries for hours into Wendy's shoulder when the calls slowly stop and never start again. He tries to track his brother down, in between college classes and midterms and commitments, but if Abel doesn't want to be found, he won't be. His eyes scan the audience at his graduation and something breaks inside his chest when Abel isn't there. When he gets married, the space at his side is conspicuously empty, even though he could've chosen anyone, because if it couldn't be Abel there wasn't a point.
He goes through life like something is missing, the air a little harder to breathe and things seeming duller than he knows they are. He never stops hoping to look up and see familiar blue eyes looking back at him, even as he ages and watches his own children grow, even as his company takes off, but he never does. It's almost as if Abel had never existed, like he had grown up with a ghost, but he remembers. When his daughter announces that she's pregnant and that she's naming the baby Abel he chokes up, squeezing his eyes shut around the tears. When the boy is born, he has the same unnaturally blue eyes, and he somehow knows that his brother isn't on the earth anymore.
He mourns in his own way, quietly, late at night when his wife is sleeping and the house is quiet. His life is long, content, happy. He lives to see his great-granddaughter being born, to see his children grow up and get married and start lives of their own. He outlives his wife and rejects his children's pleas that he accept help now that he's alone because he can take care of himself, but if he's truthful, it does scare him. It started to scare him almost a decade before, when he opened his eyes one morning to Abel sitting on the dresser kicking his legs obnoxiously. "Man, you got old, Tommy." The laugh is the same as he remembers, but when he opens his eyes again, Abel is gone.
He dies peacefully, somewhere in his 90s, surrounded by his family even if he doesn't remember who they are anymore, doesn't recognize their faces. It's different than how he expected it. His vision just starts to go dark at the edges and he knows that this is it. In his last few seconds, the last thing he heard was a voice laughing in his ear, "It's about time, nerd."