For the first time in nearly 30 years, Marty makes a phone call to an important person.

Phyllis Shapiro was visiting her daughter in Texas when her cell phone rang. It was hard to make out what the person on the other end was saying, she recalls, though it sounded something like “brother Marty.”

After all this time.

Shapiro had been bracing for this call for decades. Her brother, Marty Markowitz, hadn’t talked to her since the early 1980s, when he started seeing a Manhattan psychiatrist and severed ties with his family. Now it was New Year’s Eve 2010. Struggling to hear the caller, she wondered: Does Marty need a kidney? Is he dead?

Soon it became clear. Her brother was on the other end of the line — and he wanted back into her life.

Would she take him?