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Chris and Derek are both quiet for a moment, simmering in the now-impotent need to know how big my dick is compared to theirs and frustrated at not knowing. George casts a disapproving look my way, but I ignore it. The twins crave his approval like heroin. Not me.
By and by, dinner begins to be obviously finished. We’ve moved on from eating and talking about our own lives to comparing them to everyone else’s lives — the natural next step. Mama still hasn’t said more than a dozen words since I got here, and she’s getting more and more agitated. Soon after this, I know, she’ll end up having another panic attack.
I want to slap the twins for ignoring her in favor of George. My mother is proud of her boys, and she says it when she gets the chance. They couldn’t care less, though. Mama’s always been free with her praise and approval. George, on the other hand, always made us work for it, gave it rarely, and never without reminding us that he could withdraw it at any moment. Supply and demand. The first lesson he ever taught us.
When I’m finally full up with hearing about how someone at work was promoted over George — he didn’t deserve it, of course — and Chris’s purchase of a new hybrid that gets better gas mileage than Derek’s — and at a steal after he haggled down the salesman, no less — I stand, and gather my mother’s dishes along with my own.
She stands up with me, eager to be away from the table, too.
“I’ll handle the dishes, Mama,” I tell her when she reaches for the plates I’ve gathered. “Take a load off. It’s the least I can do.”
George eyes my mother as she leaves the room, and flashes me a nasty look before he turns his attention back on my brothers. Good. Maybe they’ll jerk each other off all night.
The task of washing dishes gives me some tangible work to focus on, even if it does lull me into a dangerous reverie where that smug bastard is still, somehow, waiting for me with those stupid smoldering eyes and that idiot’s grin. Why he’s still lodged in my brain is a mystery I don’t plan on solving.
I’m content, though, to do this work and then leave. George apparently has other plans. His heavy gait announces him like war drums. The counter creaks when he leans on it.
“Can’t even socialize with your own brothers?” he asks.
“Is that what they were doing?” I wonder out loud. “I thought it was a dick-measuring contest.”
“You didn’t have to come, you know.” From his tone, he could have been telling me I didn’t have to be born.
“Yes, I did,” I mutter, and put the next to last plate in the rack to dry.
“I’m not the one who invited you,” George growls. “You don’t have to be pissed at me about being here. For once, you could just show a little respect.”
It’s a bad time to say those words. I feel an itch in my hand, and nearly drop the plate instead of throwing it at him like I want to.
“You just make your mother worse, showing up like you do,” George goes on, oblivious to the imminent threat of concussion. “Just like your father.”
It stings. I know how to keep from showing it, but that doesn’t keep me from feeling it.
He’s wrong, though. My father made my mother’s craziness worse by leaving — not by coming around. Not that he caused it. He could only take so much of it, I guess, because eventually he got fed up and left her to go play out his midlife crisis with a rich Somalian supermodel.
At least, that’s the story I was told. Lately, I’ve been gradually getting back in touch with my father — not much, just a few Facebook messages and one or two short calls that amounted to small talk. I had tried to get Chris and Derek to join me in that, but they both refused. I suppose I can’t blame them, but… there are times when I feel isolated from the rest of the family for it.
What I can tell of my father so far? He’s a better man than George. Of course, that isn’t saying much.
“If I’m more like my father,” I tell him, “than I am you, then I’m proud of it, George.”
He snorts at me and when I turn I get the rare chance to sneer at him. “Jesus, you're pathetic.”
He trembles with anger as I pass him by to get to the dining room, and from there drop in to say goodnight to my mother. Chris and Derek both stay seated, and give barely interested waves when I announce that I’m leaving.
I swear, one day I have got to stop getting mired in this bullshit.
Jake
Reginald’s plan, after I failed to snag Janie Hall, was worse than the one before. Leaning on the corner of Ferry Lights just an hour after getting the text that it all went off without a hitch, I watch as Janie comes tearing up to Red Hall’s curb and doesn’t even bother to hand the keys to the valet. Instead, she dashes inside.
There, I know, she’ll find the damage. A busted water main. It’ll put her place out of commission for up to a week depending on who she can find to fix it, and unfortunately my father already ensured that it wouldn’t be anyone local.
Reginald’s text was triumphant and banal. It took no effort to get one of his thugs in there, of course. It is a restaurant. His man simply made reservations.
My father has no real reason to harass Janie this way. Ferry Lights is doing fine, and so is Red Hall. It’s ridiculous to prey on a woman like Janie just on her own merits, though. She worked hard to get where she is and she did it with no significant investors, a single Facebook page, and a dream.
And me? I don’t have much of a choice but to sit front and center to watch this train wreck happen. The fact is, Reginald gets what Reginald wants. So do I, normally, except where it conflicts with his interests. Right now, my father wants to crush an innocent woman’s dream — more so now than before she turned me down.
