Read Online Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy - Free Book Online

Day.  A new girlfriend had put him up to it, he said. She thought they should spend time together. It bothered Jonna—that was the girlfriend’s name—that the brothers spent Christmas apart. She worked with George as a ski instructor, and she craved a family, not having had enough of one to understand what a pain in the ass it was.
    “So are you inviting us skiing or calling me a pain in the ass?” Aaron asked.
    “Don’t be a jerk,” his brother said.
    “ I’m the jerk?” Aaron wished he could play a recording of the phone calls for a third party and get some satisfaction, but George usually managed to make him sound childish, too.
    “Just say no,” George said. “So I can tell Jonna you don’t want to.”
    “Tell her no yourself.”
    “I can’t.”
    “Then get a new girlfriend.”
    “She is a new girlfriend. That’s why I can’t say no.”
    “Since when is Presidents’ Day a family holiday?”
    “Oh, hell, Aaron,” George said. “It’s a weekend people go skiing. She just thinks we should get together.”
    “Do we have to chop down a cherry tree? Recite the Gettysburg Address?”
    “I’ll tell her you said no.”
    “We’re coming,” Aaron said, before George could hang up. It was not the first time he had done something solely because his brother seemed to want him not to. He would have to ask his wife, and Bea would remind him of his altitude sickness and his constant fighting with George, but he could manage all of that. “We’ll be there,” he said.
    “Suit yourself,” George said, as if the trip were Aaron’s idea. “Make sure you bring Claire.”
    “I’ll see if she’s free.”
    “I already asked her,” George said.  “She’s in.  You just have to fly her home.”
    Aaron hung up and spent the rest of the evening fuming at George’s presumption. Aaron’s daughter, Claire, was now a sophomore in college, but he didn’t think of her as someone who could be invited separately on a trip. She was the little girl who had climbed on his head, who had asked him if people could see inside her mind, who had loved his old Mad magazines as he thought no girl had ever loved Mad , giggling at them while he read the paper, asking sometimes to have things explained. Into her teens she had stayed home on weekend nights and watched old movies with him, curled under his arm on the couch, while Bea wandered off, losing interest. He could still feel the weight of his daughter’s head against his chest, and see, cast in silver light from the TV, the rapt absorption with which she watched. The only movie they disagreed on was Rebecca . It was his least favorite Hitchcock, but she loved the sweet, simple girl meeting the rich man with the dark secrets: “I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool,” shouted from his hotel dressing room.
    His brother might have despised Claire, since he hated everything else Aaron had. He liked to say that Aaron’s career as an orthopedic surgeon was mercenary, his marriage to a fellow doctor bourgeois, and his modest house on a hillside an environmental nightmare. So he might, by extension, have declared Claire a spoiled, entitled brat. But Claire wasn’t spoiled, and George loved his niece. He had courted her from the time she could walk and talk, bringing her presents from his adventures. He played invented games with her, endless games for which no one else had patience. In her favorite, he was the Fire, chasing her around the house and the backyard, never quite catching her, while she squealed with terror and glee. Aaron had tried to be the Fire a few times, out of fatherly duty, but he didn’t do it with the correct enthusiasm. Claire tried to direct him but soon lost interest. She could play it for hours with her uncle.
    When she was old enough, Claire learned to ski. She was fearless, and George advanced the theory that the fearlessness came somehow from him.
    “How do you think that would work?” Aaron had asked.
    “She didn’t get it