“What the hell are youdoing?” My brother’s booming voice scared the crap out of me. The door slamming behind him had the same effect.
After placing the box markedChristmasI was holding onto the couch, I ran a hand through my hair. I knew this wasn’t going to be an easy conversation, but it was one we needed to have. “Benny, it’s time.” Easing down onto the arm of the sofa, I crossed my arms as if it would ward offthe teenage anger he was about to hurl at me. Hoping to make sense to him before he exploded, I continued without giving him any space to voice his complaints. “I don’t want to do it either, but it’s time. Besides, Christmas was what, like six weeks ago? This thing needs to come down.”
Mom always liked to leave the tree up past the sixth. She said it was Little Christmas or some shit like that.She liked having it up for their anniversary. Every year, she felt the need to tell us about how they were supposed to be married right before Christmas, but some major snowstorm canceled the whole thing. They lived in Maine at the time. High school sweethearts who didn’t have a plan for anything, all they wanted to do was get married and move away from their parents. So when their wedding wassnowed out, Mom was bummed because she’d missed out on all the Christmas decorations. If I closed my eyes, I could even see her standing next to the tree, hanging each ornament so lovingly as if she’d made them herself. The shitty little VFW hall where they had their reception had already taken down their shitty little Christmas tree by the time my parents could have their wedding, so my father, determinedto make her happy, literally decked the halls the night before their wedding. So every year, she left the tree up because it reminded her of how much she loved Dad then, and how much she loved him now.
Replaying those memories, of her telling the same story year after year did nothing but make me miss her even more than I already did.
Benny tossing his backpack to the floor, huffing “Whatever”as he stormed past me, shook me from my memories. He was sixteen and moody as fuck. And that was before our parents were killed in the accident. Needless to say, their deaths only heightened his moodiness. As much as I loved him, I was struggling, too. It would be nice to have someone to lean on, but for the time being, I had to give that up in order to be there for him.
That was my new rolein life, whether I liked it or not.
So instead of blowing him off and letting him sulk in his room, I followed him into the kitchen where he made a sandwich. As he flopped down into his chair, he looked at me as if I’d disrupted the balance of the room simply by walking into it. His eyes rolled so far back into his head I wondered if he’d done permanent damage. “You can’t keep walking away fromthis. From me.” I tried my best for a “grown-up” voice, but whenever I did, I ended up sounding like some lame-ass guidance counselor trying to pry the truth out of some poor student who wanted to be anywhere but across the desk from their lame guidance counselor.
“Sure I can,” he quipped, grabbing his plate and standing.
Now it was my turn to be angry. “Sit down,” I boomed. Standing in frontof him, I stopped him from leaving the table. He tried to side-step me, but I beat him to the punch, blocking him at every move he made. “I said sit down. We need to talk. Now.” When he dropped his plate on the table, it nearly cracked in half. The sandwich slid from the plate, making a mess in the middle of us. But he was sitting. I’d take it.
Shrugging with as much energy as he’d rolled hiseyes, he stared me down. “So talk,” he goaded, anger hanging on his every word.
My lungs burned on the deep inhale. I needed every ounce of oxygen in the room to make it through this conversation. “I miss them, too, you know,” I started, trying my best not to push him away.
“So?” His snarky attitude was far too close to pushing me over the edge.
Huffing out my frustration, I steepled my fingersin front of me. “Cut the shit, Ben.” Something in either what I just said, or how I said it melted some of his icy exterior. “They’re gone and it fucking sucks.”
“You could say that again,” he said, puffing a sad laugh along with his words.
“It fucking sucks,” I accentuated each word, letting some of my own anger rise to the surface.
“Yeah it fucking does,” Benny agreed, before cradling hishead in his hands. “A lot,” he added, his voice muffled by his fingers.
A cloud of silence settled over us as I imagined we were both thinking of the same thing—the vast emptiness we were facing in starting our lives over without our parents.
In the month since they’d died, we’d dealt with so much, it felt like we’d barely talked. With relatives coming and going, neighbors dropping off mealsand stopping by for mindless chit-chat, my brother and I hadn’t had much time to ourselves to deal with it all. But now that the visitors had slowed and the relatives returned to their own homes, we had nothing left but ourselves. Now it was our own new road to navigate. And there was no better time to start than now.
“Look,” I said, grabbing his clenched hands, shaking him back to the here andnow. “I’m not him. I never will be. But I’m here for you. It’s just us from here on out. So all this shit—” I waved a hand in his general direction, indicating his understandably stand-offish behavior. “It has to stop. We’re all we’ve got.” Before I started to sound like an afterschool special, I stopped myself in that line of conversation. There was something far more important I had to tell himanyway. “And since it’s just us now, we have to be a team.”
“Okay,” he dragged out the word, clueing into the change in my tone. “Why? What happened?”
“The house,” I said, trying my best to keep my voice even. “Dad was past due on it. A few months actually. And this isn’t the first time he’d been behind.”
“What are you saying?” Ben asked, a childlike worry creeping into his newly deepened voice.
“The bank, well, it’s…,” I stammered, struggling to tell my baby brother we’d be kicked out of the only house he’d ever lived in. Going with the Band-Aid approach, I let all the details pour from my mouth. If I needed him to trust me, I needed to be honest with him. Even if it meant helping him sort through more than any sixteen-year-old should ever have to. He didn’t cry, and I’d expected justas much. But what surprised me even more was that he wasn’t angry.
He was numb.
Just as I had been when the lawyers explained everything to me.
Dad was broke. Our family was broke. Our neighbors probably had to clip every coupon in the circular to bring us a crappy casserole. In short, we were up shit creek and the rental fee on a paddle was astronomical at best.
“So what do we do now?” Bennyfinally asked after I gave him all the information I had.
On a deep breath, I admitted the final piece of information I’d been holding back from him. “I left school.” The words rushed out, making their finality known as they hung about us like a black cloud.
Shock washed over his face, and before he could say anything, I did my best to answer the stream of questions I was sure were running throughhis head. “Yes, I’ll go back when I can. I’ve been going to interviews during the day, but haven’t found anything yet. As soon as I do, I’ll let you know. And yes, I already found us an apartment. Their life insurance will get us through a few months before we reallyneedthe extra income,” I rambled, letting all the answers come out one after the other.
Seemingly satisfied with what I’d justsaid, he added, “I’ll get a job, too.” Before the protest could fall from my lips, he said, “After school and on the weekends. It’s the least I can do,” he said, his voice soft. Though he didn’t actually say the words, his offer made all the apologies he needed to for his anger in the last month—not that it was needed at all, but it helped me feel better about my decisions nonetheless.
