“Hey, Ash,” I say, closing the back door behind me.
“Hey,” she says. “I had a lot of fun last night. I was wondering if you want to maybe get together and do something.”
“Starbright driving you crazy again?” I ask. I’ve actually been hoping to meet Jana’s mom, mainly due to Ash’s vivid and outlandish descriptions of the woman. Ash, on the other hand, doesn’t think it’s such a great idea.
“Am I that transparent?” she asks.
“I’d love to see you,” I tell her, “but I don’t think tonight’s the best night for it. I just came home and found my brother passed out on the couch. I think he’s going through a bit of a thing right now, and I just need to make sure he’s not in any kind of serious trouble, you know?”
“I didn’t even know you had a brother,” Ash says.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “He’s the older one, I’m the wiser one.”
“What a terrifying proposition,” she says. “You sure you don’t want me to come over? Maybe I can help.”
“That’s sweet of you,” I tell her, but hesitate as I hear the back door opening behind me. I turn to find Chris stumbling out with an already-lit cigarette in his mouth. “But it looks like he’s awake and I’m going to have to let you go.”
“Okay,” she says. “Let me know how it goes.”
“Yeah,” I tell her. “Have a good night.”
I hang up the phone.
“Hey, Chris,” I say, taking a step toward my brother. “How are you feeling?”
He responds by pulling his lighter out of his pocket and trying to light his still-lit cigarette and tripping over a lawn chair. I can’t say he catches himself, exactly, but he does a fair job of minimizing the damage of the fall on his way down.
I walk over to him and crouch down beside him.
“You should get back inside,” I tell him. “Sleep it off. We’ll talk in the morning.”
He grunts and gets back to his feet, only to sit on the lawn chair he just fell over.
“Can you hear me?” I ask him.
“Suuure thing, brotha man,” he slurs.
Things weren’t that easy for Chris and me growing up, and we’ve both chosen to deal with it in our own ways. For Chris, it’s coming up with new and ridiculous ways to separate average people from their money.
I get that we’re both on the wrong side of things, legally, but the only people who get hurt because of what I do get hurt because they chose to put themselves in a match. It’s anyone’s guess how long it takes some of the people Chris swindles to figure out what’s happened to them.
I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t be so judgmental. Still, that would be a lot easier if he didn’t keep showing up like this.
“What happened this time?” I ask him. “Nobody followed you here, did they?”
“It was jus’ a biiig mis–misunderstanding,” he says.
Of course it was.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen my brother. I’d even begun to entertain hopes that he’d cleaned up his act, but there he sits, swaying a little in an invisible breeze.
“How long are you here?” I ask.
The question seems to confound Chris in some deep, possibly existential way, and he just stares up at me without answering.
“Whatever,” I tell him. “Let’s get you to bed. We can talk about everything in the morning.”
“Nooo,” Chris says, far too loudly for the time of night. “I wanna stay up and hang out with my little bro—”