Chapter 31
Janie
Just days after Mama’s panic attack, she calls me and begs me to come over for dinner. My brothers will be there, she says, and she’ll never hear the end of it from George if I don’t come and see them. I can tell by the sound of her voice that turning the invitation down is going to trigger a meltdown, and only because of that I cave.
So there I find myself, seated at the table with my brothers — the twins, Chris and Derek — listening to them preen and compare dick sizes under the approving gaze of our stepfather while my mother smiles weakly. It doesn’t get to her eyes.
“Yeah, we did about fifty grand last quarter,” Derek says, as he and Chris get to the part of dinner where it’s time to impress George. “Gross. Took a little bit of a hit when the new shop opened up down the street, of course, because I had to drop the price of cuts for a couple of weeks. You should have seen their place — crickets in there. Who thinks they can just open up a business next door? I’ve been in that spot for three years.”
Chris rolls his eyes with a knowing nod. “Upstarts,” he snorts. “Stupid. We had something like that happen a couple of years ago. One of my first therapists up and leaves, right? And she opens her own spa just two miles from my front door. Of course, she can’t just steal clients — but she can put her face and name up all over town and make it easy to find her.”
“What did you do?” Derek asks.
Chris grins like a shark. “I didn’t do anything. But word somehow got around that she was, you know…” He makes the universal gesture for a hand job, and this sets George and Derek both off on a chuckling fit.
“What about you?” Derek asks me. “Didn’t uh… Ronald Ferry or someone open up that Ferry Lights place right across the street from you?”
“Reginald,” I say.
“Yeah, okay,” Derek laughs. “What are you doing about it?”
“Nothing,” I tell him. “I trust my business model, and my staff, and our customer base trusts us. I don’t have to do anything.”
“That’s optimistic,” Chris mutters.
I give them both a baleful eye, and that conversation is done. Chris and Derek are younger than I am. When George came around, he became the only father they knew. They grew up to be his kids, that’s for sure. They’re both ruthless businessmen with one concern: money. To George, of course, that made them the successful ones.
Red Hall isn’t just a paycheck to me. It never has been. Oh, it turns a profit — I’m good at what I do — but I opened the restaurant as proof I could do it, not to get rich. I wanted something that was mine, and now I have it. More than that, Red Hall saved my life.
College was a difficult time for me. I had started out going the culinary route because I loved food and I loved to cook. What I discovered was that I was more a theoretical chef than a good chef. It had been my only dream since childhood so, naturally, discovering that I didn’t have the talent for it was crushing.
Red Hall didn’t just give me a paycheck. It gave me life, gave me a direction. It reminded me, from the day I changed majors to the day the doors finally opened, that I didn’t have to be bound by the ghost of my mother’s instability or the taint of George’s obvious borderline personality disorder. I was free the day I started dreaming.
Chris and Derek are both quiet for a moment, simmering in the now-impotent need to know how big my dick is compared to theirs and frustrated at not knowing. George casts a disapproving look my way, but I ignore it. The twins crave his approval like heroin. Not me.
By and by, dinner begins to be obviously finished. We’ve moved on from eating and talking about our own lives to comparing them to everyone else’s lives — the natural next step. Mama still hasn’t said more than a dozen words since I got here, and she’s getting more and more agitated. Soon after this, I know, she’ll end up having another panic attack.
I want to slap the twins for ignoring her in favor of George. My mother is proud of her boys, and she says it when she gets the chance. They couldn’t care less, though. Mama’s always been free with her praise and approval. George, on the other hand, always made us work for it, gave it rarely, and never without reminding us that he could withdraw it at any moment. Supply and demand. The first lesson he ever taught us.
When I’m finally full up with hearing about how someone at work was promoted over George — he didn’t deserve it, of course — and Chris’s purchase of a new hybrid that gets better gas mileage than Derek’s — and at a steal after he haggled down the salesman, no less — I stand, and gather my mother’s dishes along with my own.
She stands up with me, eager to be away from the table, too.
“I’ll handle the dishes, Mama,” I tell her when she reaches for the plates I’ve gathered. “Take a load off. It’s the least I can do.”
George eyes my mother as she leaves the room, and flashes me a nasty look before he turns his attention back on my brothers. Good. Maybe they’ll jerk each other off all night.
The task of washing dishes gives me some tangible work to focus on, even if it does lull me into a dangerous reverie where that smug bastard is still, somehow, waiting for me with those stupid smoldering eyes and that idiot’s grin. Why he’s still lodged in my brain is a mystery I don’t plan on solving.
I’m content, though, to do this work and then leave. George apparently has other plans. His heavy gait announces him like war drums. The counter creaks when he leans on it.
“Can’t even socialize with your own brothers?” he asks.
“Is that what they were doing?” I wonder out loud. “I thought it was a dick-measuring contest.”
“You didn’t have to come, you know.” From his tone, he could have been telling me I didn’t have to be born.
“Yes, I did,” I mutter, and put the next to last plate in the rack to dry.
“I’m not the one who invited you,” George growls. “You don’t have to be pissed at me about being here. For once, you could just show a little respect.”
It’s a bad time to say those words. I feel an itch in my hand, and nearly drop the plate instead of throwing it at him like I want to.
“You just make your mother worse, showing up like you do,” George goes on, oblivious to the imminent threat of concussion. “Just like your father.”
It stings. I know how to keep from showing it, but that doesn’t keep me from feeling it.
He’s wrong, though. My father made my mother’s craziness worse by leaving — not by coming around. Not that he caused it. He could only take so much of it, I guess, because eventually he got fed up and left her to go play out his midlife crisis with a rich Somalian supermodel.
At least, that’s the story I was told. Lately, I’ve been gradually getting back in touch with my father — not much, just a few Facebook messages and one or two short calls that amounted to small talk. I had tried to get Chris and Derek to join me in that, but they both refused. I suppose I can’t blame them, but… there are times when I feel isolated from the rest of the family for it.
What I can tell of my father so far? He’s a better man than George. Of course, that isn’t saying much.
“If I’m more like my father,” I tell him, “than I am you, then I’m proud of it, George.”
He snorts at me and when I turn I get the rare chance to sneer at him. “Jesus, you're pathetic.”
He trembles with anger as I pass him by to get to the dining room, and from there drop in to say goodnight to my mother. Chris and Derek both stay seated, and give barely interested waves when I announce that I’m leaving.
I swear, one day I have got to stop getting mired in this bullshit.