Brotherly Love

“You wanna hear something funny?”, B1 asked with a trademark grin that X failed to identify as menacing until some years later. He was basically asking her to pull his finger.

“Sure.” X responded with anticipation of a joke not knowing she would be the punchline.

“So, I was emailing this guy about a housing co-op. He recognized our last name and asked if I was related to you…” her brother proceeded to tell of how this man poured his heart out about how she ruined his life, she ruined women for him. His laughter mimed cartoon knee-slapping, head and eyebrows bobbing like a hand beckoning that she join in on the fun. A fart would have been more palatable.

The man he named she had dated briefly when she was 20, it was a nightmare. She’d gotten pregnant on very thin odds. X found out after they’d broken up. After she told him, he became very controlling in a way that frightened her, stating that they *would* live together and conducting himself as though she now belonged to him. She called lawyers and legal aid to discuss her options and it sounded as though she would not have much protection from him if she had his child. She did not have that child and they never spoke again.

While she had been pregnant and planning to see it through to parenthood, she had told her employer at a government job. some time after her pregnancy ended, a coworker confessed that the whole crew had been waiting for her to show, because her boss told the guy below him and that guy held a secret staff meeting to explain her situation. X, mortified, went to HR, who held another secret meeting, where three men, including the two superiors involved told her that she could either keep her job and finish her co-op term, or she could file her complaint and set precedent- she could not have both. She never was able to find work in her field of study again after that.*

……………………………………………………………..

X was standing between her vehicle and his at the edge of a small island rave. She could hear him inside, complaining about her. How she’d been a nightmare for him.

A couple months prior, X had parked her truck across his stall at the commune, blocking his van in. He’d gotten her pregnant, on rare odds. Odds so rare, he refused to believe it. Refusing to believe it, he refused to contribute on the cost to take care of it. She could not afford it alone, and she couldn’t afford what it would take to prove him wrong in his belief that she must have been with other men. It was one of the boldest moves X had ever pulled, but she didn’t know what to do, just that she had to do something.

He paid his share, and it turned out, felt pretty scorned by that fact, believing still that she had done all of this as some psyched out con. Slits in the blinds of his van at her eye level revealed that the person he was commiserating with, was B2. He should have been scolding this man for what he’d done to his sister, but he was acting like a comrade.

She hollered into the crack in the window she’d heard it all of to reveal their poor concealment to hear them both scramble to compensate.

B2 found her shortly after to let her know that he was on her side but he was working something subtle, like he was a double agent or something. She believed him.

…………………………………………….

“There’s no way you’d actually fall for that unless you wanted to.”, her brothers would groan as children in constant disbelief of her naïveté .

………………………………………..

There would be many moments like these, where her brothers would demonstrate how they regarded her and she would miss it. She always forgave them, always took their word for it, could often be convinced that she was in fact the culprit for some reason or another.

Sometimes X missed being able to believe that they loved her, but that sort of delusion is part of what allowed things to get so bad. They had been enemies, keeping her close. Now that she could spot it, they were nowhere in sight.

*though there’s no saying she’d been blacklisted, her uncle may have just been blocking her application emails.