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Authors: Melissa Senate
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telling me what to do!” he’d scream back. “And I’m not getting a cell phone. You can get cancer from cell phones.”
“What if something happens?” I yelled again.
His response was some indecipherable mutter (his usual response).
And then something happened. And I couldn’t reach Emmett.
Despite all the people, there’d been no family.
No family meant me. And I was strong, I’d been born strong apparently, and made stronger just a few years later, but I wasn’t that strong. I wasn’t immune to the aforementioned raging. The crying jags, the fear.
Emmett turned up three weeks and four days after my grandmother’s stroke, with an overnight bag slung over his shoulder, his stupid grin and shaggy blondish-brown hair that always needed a cut but always looked rock-star good anyway. I opened my apartment door to find him with a girlfriend in tow, a pretty blonde with braided pigtails despite her age, which had to be at least twenty-five. Her name was Charlotte. Emmett wanted to know if he and Charlotte could crash on my couch for a few days until Charlotte’s freshly painted living-room walls dried.
“It’s a really cool plum color,” Charlotte said.
I ignored her and told my brother to go to hell.
“You have a lot of rage,” Charlotte said before I clued them both into why.
“I didn’t know, okay?” he screamed back, red-faced. “How was I supposed to know that Grams had a stroke if I didn’t know?”
Gee, Emmett, and you went to Yale?
“You were supposed to know because you should havebeen here!” I said. “You should have been here or should be reachable. But you’re a selfish, self-absorbed brat!” I stood there yelling. “Grams is all we have of family…where the hell have you been since you were eighteen…taking off on whims without a second thought…leaving all the responsibility to me…where have you been the past three weeks when Grams, our only family in the world, has been in a hospital, slowly recovering from a stroke that you didn’t even know she had…you wouldn’t know it if I dropped dead in the street…Selfish brat!…Self-absorbed!…Immature!…”
I went on and on and on.
Lips tight, Emmett listened until I stopped yelling. Then he said, “I don’t need this crap,” and he and Charlotte stomped off, her pigtails flopping against her puffy white jacket as they headed down the stairwell.
That was the last time I saw him.
He sent my grandmother postcards. During the past year, he’d been all over the United States. Beverly Hills. Las Vegas. Chicago. Nashville and Memphis. Atlanta.
“Don’t be so hard on your brother,” Grams would say when I’d toss the postcard aside with a harrumph. “It’s all very complicated.”
It wasn’t complicated. Nothing was complicated. Things either were or weren’t.
And Emmett was a weren’t.
“Emmett and I have the same background,” I ranted to Grams. “What’s complicated about him should be complicated about me. And here I am!”
“Yes,” she’d say, “but you’re different people.”
Right. I was a normal human being who took care of the one true relative aside from Emmett I had on this earth. And Emmett was a self-absorbed jerk brat!
“Things aren’t black and white, dear,” Grams would say.
I would nod, but I secretly didn’t agree.
You were or you weren’t.
“Eloise, dear, as a traditionalist…”
Startled out of the memories, I turned around to find Noah’s mother, Dottie Benjamin, eyeing me with a frown. I took my hand off the leather-bound Great Expectations I didn’t even know I was clutching.
“Dear,” Mrs. Benjamin said, “I’m sure Beth was exaggerating—she’s been in the foulest mood lately—but she was muttering like crazy about having to wear a Halloween costume to her own brother’s wedding. Dear, does that make any sense to you? I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”
A woman standing behind Mrs. Benjamin wiggled her way through the small group of people
“What if something happens?” I yelled again.
His response was some indecipherable mutter (his usual response).
And then something happened. And I couldn’t reach Emmett.
Despite all the people, there’d been no family.
No family meant me. And I was strong, I’d been born strong apparently, and made stronger just a few years later, but I wasn’t that strong. I wasn’t immune to the aforementioned raging. The crying jags, the fear.
Emmett turned up three weeks and four days after my grandmother’s stroke, with an overnight bag slung over his shoulder, his stupid grin and shaggy blondish-brown hair that always needed a cut but always looked rock-star good anyway. I opened my apartment door to find him with a girlfriend in tow, a pretty blonde with braided pigtails despite her age, which had to be at least twenty-five. Her name was Charlotte. Emmett wanted to know if he and Charlotte could crash on my couch for a few days until Charlotte’s freshly painted living-room walls dried.
“It’s a really cool plum color,” Charlotte said.
I ignored her and told my brother to go to hell.
“You have a lot of rage,” Charlotte said before I clued them both into why.
“I didn’t know, okay?” he screamed back, red-faced. “How was I supposed to know that Grams had a stroke if I didn’t know?”
Gee, Emmett, and you went to Yale?
“You were supposed to know because you should havebeen here!” I said. “You should have been here or should be reachable. But you’re a selfish, self-absorbed brat!” I stood there yelling. “Grams is all we have of family…where the hell have you been since you were eighteen…taking off on whims without a second thought…leaving all the responsibility to me…where have you been the past three weeks when Grams, our only family in the world, has been in a hospital, slowly recovering from a stroke that you didn’t even know she had…you wouldn’t know it if I dropped dead in the street…Selfish brat!…Self-absorbed!…Immature!…”
I went on and on and on.
Lips tight, Emmett listened until I stopped yelling. Then he said, “I don’t need this crap,” and he and Charlotte stomped off, her pigtails flopping against her puffy white jacket as they headed down the stairwell.
That was the last time I saw him.
He sent my grandmother postcards. During the past year, he’d been all over the United States. Beverly Hills. Las Vegas. Chicago. Nashville and Memphis. Atlanta.
“Don’t be so hard on your brother,” Grams would say when I’d toss the postcard aside with a harrumph. “It’s all very complicated.”
It wasn’t complicated. Nothing was complicated. Things either were or weren’t.
And Emmett was a weren’t.
“Emmett and I have the same background,” I ranted to Grams. “What’s complicated about him should be complicated about me. And here I am!”
“Yes,” she’d say, “but you’re different people.”
Right. I was a normal human being who took care of the one true relative aside from Emmett I had on this earth. And Emmett was a self-absorbed jerk brat!
“Things aren’t black and white, dear,” Grams would say.
I would nod, but I secretly didn’t agree.
You were or you weren’t.
“Eloise, dear, as a traditionalist…”
Startled out of the memories, I turned around to find Noah’s mother, Dottie Benjamin, eyeing me with a frown. I took my hand off the leather-bound Great Expectations I didn’t even know I was clutching.
“Dear,” Mrs. Benjamin said, “I’m sure Beth was exaggerating—she’s been in the foulest mood lately—but she was muttering like crazy about having to wear a Halloween costume to her own brother’s wedding. Dear, does that make any sense to you? I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”
A woman standing behind Mrs. Benjamin wiggled her way through the small group of people
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