brother number two, part one.
brother number two, part two.
We'd been talking on the phone, a lot, because the family was trying to coordinate the goodbye's to their dying brother. Everyone at once was decided to be too much, so it would be a series of visits, one after the other. Working out the logistics of dying takes many phone calls. We talked more in this month than close to ever.
My visit was first, my father's followed, and then there were no more.
But while I was still in NY brother number two and his wife came up from New Jersey for a day. They wanted to go to Bubba Gumps in Time Square. They love Bubba Gumps in Time Square. I believe I nursed a cup of tea.
I learned he was despondent over his job and desperately looking for a change. Much of our conversation would become about how I (slightly savvier on a computer that didn't exist until we were all adults) would help him, and the groundwork was being laid for this. When six months passed and we were all to reunion at my father's, the plan was for him to bring a bunch of resumes with him and we would spend our extra days there going to places to drop them off and maybe have conversations with people.
Brother number two can be beautifully engaging and embracing of people (he gets that from me) and getting someone to have a five minute conversation with him versus blindly emailing resumes would serve him well. So we agreed to spend our extra time doing this, and also he was to plan a route home that would take us through towns in which he might want to make stops to do the same.
This is what we did instead.
Every morning before I got up he and his wife left the house to go shopping for figurines and other tchotchkes. Look at this little skunk, isn't it cute? Look at this little kitten, how could you not? ... while I remained trapped in the house for the week. Then one night he announced we'd be getting up at 4 a.m. to drive home in one felled swoop.
Brother number two is a heavy smoker who over the years has told us he's both cut back and switched to lighter cigarettes. As soon as we left my father's house I discovered he'd done neither. At every rest stop and gas station he would buy three or four more cartons of Marlboro reds.
They buy a lot of things, it turns out. In one month they bought a big screen TV, an oven, a computer, about 15 cartons of cigarettes, twenty cats and squirrels and skunks, lots of gas, and a rental car for a week. She was on disability and he was barely making anything, how were they doing this? Rhetorical question, I didn't actually want to know.
She was out on disability because she was recovering from her third surgery from her third hernia from the gastric bypass, the one where she gained all the weight back.
We were in New Jersey, it was 11 p.m., everyone was exhausted, and he wouldn't return the rental car, his wife and I did it while he sat in front of the TV and chain smoked the whole while we were out.
I know this because he was still sitting there smoking, watching TV when we got home. Next she had to cook him dinner, because he doesn't do that, it's her job. So she did her job while he sat there in glum, soul-sucking silence. When he was done and he got up and walked away and she got up and took his plate to the sink and washed the dishes. (I made and ate my own dinner and did my own dishes.)
He never says please, he never says thank you, he walks away in silence.
And I thought, uh-oh. I thought, Wow, this is vintage brother number two, this is the guy I walked away from twenty years ago vowing never to return, this is the raging asshole entrenched in mire that all must suffer before he is happy. Here I was sitting in it again, and it was ripe.
chapter 3.