Page 6 of Requiem
Mom reaches up to tuck a stray bit of grayish brown hair behind her ear. She looks tired …no, resigned. It makes me wonder if she expected to find my brother here waiting for us. I notice her hands are as steady as a surgeon’s as she sips her tea. When she takes the mug from her lips, her eyebrows knit together and she wags a pink-nailed finger at him dismissively.
“No need. We’re just back from his office. It’s all taken care of, so I suppose you should just be on your way.”
I see his smile slip a little, his eyes cloud over slightly.
“Okay. Will he be mailing me my check then?”
“What check is that, Jeremy?”
The last of his smile is gone now.
“Don’t play around with me, Mother. I’d like to know what to expect as my share of the inheritance.”
“You don’t have a share of the inheritance,” she replies, not even bothering to look at him as she swirls the tea in her mug.
Jeremy draws a long breath, as if he is willing himself to stay calm. Christ, this is getting worse by the second. I don’t know what is going on between the two of them exactly, but Maggie and I are looking back and forth from one to the other, as if we were watching a match at Wimbledon.
It’s Jeremy’s serve next.
“I’m not going to say it again, Mom, don’t play with me. I know I’m in the will, and I expect you to honor that. To honor Dad’s wishes.”
She lobs it back over the net to him.
“No. You’re not in the will, actually. I don’t know why you’d think that was the case.”
“Because I’ve seen the goddamn thing,” he spits, a little too loudly.
That’s a deduction for unsportsmanlike conduct right there.
“Oh!” Mom exclaims, as if something has just occurred to her. “You must have been snooping around in your father’s office. No, Jeremy, that’s an old will. Your father and I had Ralph draw up a new one last year. I think it was right after your last visit here. You know, the time when you tried to break my arm, and your father had to get his rifle out?”
“What?”
The single word that comes out of my mouth is, all at once, a question, a statement and a threat. Four little letters convey to my brother that I had better damned well have misheard or misunderstood what our mother has just said.
“Oh, please,” he snarls with disgust. “The bitch was asking for it. I just came here to ask them, very politely, to stay out of our business.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing.
“Whose business?” I hiss. “And when, exactly, did this all happen?”
“Our business,” he asserts, gesturing between him and me. “Yours and mine. It was when they wanted you to move out of the apartment. I didn’t want them getting in the way of what I saw as a mutually beneficial living arrangement between two brothers. But she got her panties in a twist, and Dad overreacted, as usual.”
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
“He threatened me,” Mom interjects mildly, as if she is correcting him on some small, insignificant point. “I slapped him and he threatened me again. I told him to get out. He twisted my arm and tried to break it. That’s when your father pulled the gun out of the pantry. It was the only way he could get Jeremy to leave the house.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?" I roar from across the table. It’s not immediately clear to me which one of them I’m more pissed at: him for doing it, or her for not telling me he did it.
“We had it well under control, and didn’t want to bother you with it,” Mom continues, reading my thoughts.
I’m dumbfounded, looking from one to the other incredulously. “So now you understand why we changed the will.”
I close my eyes and shake my head a little, as if to shake this conversation out of my head, but it’s not budging. I can feel my blood pressure start to climb. My jaw is clenched and I’m breathing heavily through my nose. Any second now I’m going to blow smoke out of my ears like some cartoon character. Maggie sees where this is going and pats the empty chair next to her.
“Come and sit down,” she encourages, raising her eyebrows and nodding at me.
They’re all watching with silent interest as I make my way around the table slowly, glaring at my brother as I do.
