With food stains on his favorite shirt and his boxers stinking just a little too much for a single day, I knew I had to intervene now or risk losing my brother to the endless loop of depression from his recent breakup.
“You can’t just sit here all the time. You have to get out there again and find someone new.”
“I had someone new,” he mumbled. “She left me.”
Rolling my eyes, I tugged on his arm, pulling him up from the couch. “She did not leave you. She moved to a different state for a great opportunity.”
“And in the process, she left me,” he reiterated.
“Sawyer, you were dating her for a month.”
His face scrunched up, and for just a terrified minute, I thought he was going to start crying. “The best month of my life.”
“And there will be others who will break your heart even more than her,” I said, shoving him toward his room. “Now, get dressed and I’ll buy you a drink.”
“At the Old Tavern?”
The thought of going in there had me scrunching my nose in disgust. “No way. We’ll go to The Beaver and Boot.”
“But that place is full of women.”
“Precisely my point,” I said, steering him into the bathroom first. “You need a shower or no woman will ever look at you again.”
“I don’t want a woman,” he pouted. “I only wanted her.”
“You didn’t even like her the first time you went out.”
I turned on the shower and made sure it was extra hot to wash away all the grime that had been building up over the last twenty-four hours.
“Pearl,” he whimpered, sighing heavily. “Why did you leave me?”
“If you start singing some sad cowboy song, I’ll make you the most disgusting tea you’ve ever had and I won’t leave until you’ve had every last sip.”
“Wouldn’t matter,” he whimpered, his face twisting in anguish. “You could kill me and it would be less painful than what I’m feeling right now.”
“That’s blue balls,” I clarified.
“It’s my heart shredding into tiny pieces. These aren’t tears in my eyes. That’s my blood leaking through every orifice.”
“That’s disgusting. I need a shower just listening to this. I’m leaving, and when I knock on the door in ten minutes, you’d better be clean, or I swear to God, I will follow through on my threat.”
I slammed the door, shuddering at the visual he’d just given me. It was bad enough that I had to live with my brother, but he was so sensitive, which meant every time some woman broke his heart, I had to go through another one of his depressive states and pull him out of the dark with women and cheap beer.
Honestly, I felt bad for all the women at the bar tonight. Instead of trying to pick one of them up, he’d tell his sad story to all of them, making them just as depressed as him.
But I couldn’t allow him to keep sinking any further. I’d never get him out of this state if I let him wallow.
While he showered, I picked out the cleanest things I could find in his room, then shoved everything else in the washer. Sometimes I felt like his mother, which was not at all what I wanted, but letting him go out in public as he was would only make the situation worse.
If things didn’t go right tonight, I’d have to call in the big guns, which meant it was time to make a phone call. Dialing my grandma’s number, I felt slightly bad for tattling on Sawyer, but not bad enough to hang up.
“Hey, Josie! I haven’t heard from you in a week!”
“Well, the phone works both ways,” I reminded her.
“Your grandfather and I have been very busy, even with all this cold weather. I was thinking of getting one of those time shares in Florida.”
“I’d rather have a few cold days than never-ending heat, thank you very much.”
