“Pardon me?”
“He must have a way with women,” I clarified, because I’d immediately pictured her little brother. He was just under average height had very dark hair with amber-brown eyes, white teeth, and a charming smile. He was the kind of guy who could throw a beer across a bar and go home with the phone number of the woman whom he drenched. He might even bring that sticky girl along with him, too.
But her eyes widened when she heard my words, and she shook her head. “Like he’s smooth? Not really. He’s not that type. In fact, he just split with his girlfriend, and she said that part of their problem was that he was clueless.”
“Hm,” I said, noncommittal. “Clueless” could have covered a lot, from unintentionally inconsiderate to purposefully cruel.
“My sister and I thought that she expected him to read her mind and she never thought that he was good enough, either. It’s for the best that they broke up,” she assured me. “We’re all glad that it’s over. No one on our side was very fond of Mary Evelyn.” From the expression of disgust on her face, it seemed as if she had actually hated Mary Evelyn. “But he liked her a lot, especially at first, and it’s another setback. He’s had a hard time with adulthood.”
I nodded pleasantly, instead of asking the obvious: how had he gotten away with that attitude? Why hadn’t he needed to grow up and take care of himself? Maybe it was because of this woman pulling clean-up duty. She seemed totally together, very pretty and very well-dressed. She also had the dog and those three beautiful kids, and her husband had been in a few of herpictures, smiling and looking handsome. Besides her shoulder injury, I wondered if anything could have been wrong in her life.
I got the answer soon enough: yes. It was her brother. He was the problem.
“He’s such a smart guy,” she declared. “Of course, he messed around some in high school and college. But who didn’t?”
“Lots of people did,” I said, and she told me that she had, too, and related a story about getting caught buying weed in her high school parking lot.
“I was terrified,” she told me. “But it worked out because I’m not a hardened criminal and he isn’t either. Sure, he used to smoke some, drink some, mess around with a few different girls.”
Exactly. That was exactly what I’d thought about him. He was a handsome charmer who hurt people, but this woman was blinded by sibling love. She wouldn’t or couldn’t understand that underneath the looks and smiles, he was probably a bad guy. It could surprise you how low people could go.
“He’s a very nice person, too,” she assured me. “It just seems like he never got kickstarted.”
“Kickstarted,” I repeated, and she shrugged the one shoulder again.
“My grandpa had a motorcycle,” she explained, and then continued to tell me about engines and batteries. What I got out of it was that you used to have to push down on a pedal to get it all going. She believed that was what her brother needed, too, a quick shove to spark his life into gear.
“My dad also says that he needs a kick, right in the ass,” she confessed. “My parents have been pretty patient but it’s wearing thin. The Bank of Dad is now closed, permanently, and he’s not allowed to live at home. But that’s normal for a guy his age.”
“How old is he?” I asked. Seven years before at the age of eighteen, I had left for college and I had gone home only once. I wondered what her idea of normal was.
“He’s twenty-nine,” she said, and I must have looked surprised or maybe disgusted. “He hasn’t lived with them in years,” she quickly added. “But they let him know that it’s definitely not an option anymore. They took him off their cell phone plan and they don’t pay his insurance.”
“Is he homeless?”
“No!” she told me. “He has an apartment. He used to, anyway, with Mary Evelyn, but now he’s staying in my basement for a while. Not for too long, just until he can figure all this out.”
Uh huh. “Well, that’s convenient when you need a ride from him, and it sounds like he has time on his hands to help you.”
“He holds down jobs,” she continued to defend him. “He was even going for his PhD, but…”
Unfortunately, that hadn’t worked out. He’d quit before he’d started to write the dissertation, since his heart wasn’t really in it (and in her opinion, he’d been trying to prolong his education in order to push back the start date on real life even further). Post-academia, none of his career choices had really panned out, either. He’d gone to work at what had sounded like a promising business, but she had changed her bullish opinion onits chances of success once she’d researched the founder and discovered his history of two bankruptcies and a conviction for fraud. Unsurprisingly, that company had failed. So had the next place her brother chose to work, which folded quietly without any severance for the employees.
Lately, he’d been employed remotely for a business located in the Caribbean, but when they’d wanted him onsite? “His girlfriend Mary Evelyn said no way, she wasn’t moving there,” the woman huffed. “She really stifled him.”
“Too bad.”
“In the end, she was right, because the company closed up shop within six months,” she admitted. “Not that any of these problems were actually his fault.”
Uh huh. Didn’t sound like he’d helped, though. “So he’s nearing thirty, he’s a failed PhD candidate, he just got dumped because his girlfriend thought he wasn’t in her league, he’s never had a job that lasted, and he’s living in his sister’s basement.”
“Holy shit.” Now the woman rubbed her forehead, like maybe I’d given her a headache. “Holy shit. Yeah, all of that is correct. If you met him, though, you’d see that he’s not some kind of nutter. He’s a really good guy.”
Sure.He sounded—
Another employee in scrubs had come out of the back examination rooms and she and the receptionist had a whispered confab. All eyes in the waiting area focused on them and all conversations ceased, including ours.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re really sorry about the delay,” the receptionist announced to us. “It looks like we’re going to have to reschedule some of you.”
