Coffee.
I take a nice, long whiff. Okay, maybe being awake early isn’t such a bad thing. Not when there’s coffee to be had. I take a few steps forward, but then I stop. There’s something strange.
Voices.
I hear voices.
Who could possibly be over at this time of day? It’s much too early for visitors, yet I hear Gram’s voice quietly murmuring in the kitchen. As I approach, something holds me back.
I should burst in and demand to know who thought it was okay to bother a little old lady in the wee hours, but I don’t. I couldn’t say why, but there’s a growing feeling of dread in my stomach as I pause in the living room.
Something is wrong.
Instead of barging into the kitchen, I quietly walk over to the door and hesitate, waiting to hear what they’re saying. I wonder if I should run back upstairs and get my cell phone. Maybe I should call the cops. That might be a bit extreme, though. Maybe a neighbor just needed to borrow a cup of sugar or something…
At 5:00 in the morning…
“There’s no money,” Gram insists. Her voice sounds pained and weak. What the fuck? No one makes my Gram sound like that. “I haven’t gotten any here. You, of all people, should know I don’t keep cash on hand.”
That’s true, I think to myself as she talks. Gram only keeps a small amount of cash on hand to pay her bills. She owns her house outright and invests most of the money she makes from her real estate properties. She doesn’t believe in having a jar of pennies hanging around. She’s very modern with her finances.
But who wants money from her?
A robber?
A friend?
A-
“You know that’s not what I want, Grandmother,” the voice sneers, and I choke back a gasp. I know that voice.
I could never forget that voice.
My blood turns to ice as I freeze, waves of fear racing over my body as I realize who is standing in my grandmother’s kitchen, just feet from me.
I haven’t seen my older brother in years, but I’ll never forget his parting words to me at our parents’ funeral.
I’ll take everything.
I didn’t know what it meant at the time. Not really. I was too young, too heartbroken to realize that he literally was going to take everything: and he did. He managed to become the trustee of the estate and I never saw a dime. Not that I wanted anything. I didn’t want a thing and Gram ensured all of my needs were met. She worked her ass off to care for me and she never complained.
Jeffrey took everything my parents owned and ran off, and I haven’t seen him since.
I haven’t missed him once.
As a college student, I didn’t realize how good it was that he was away, that he was gone. I didn’t realize that it was great while it lasted, but that it would be a temporary reprieve. I didn’t realize that one day, my dear brother would come back.
And that he would want to take even more from me.
Jeffrey and I have never been close, we’ve never been friends, we’ve never gotten along. Why is he at Gram’s this early? Why is he asking her for money? What could he possibly need? Or want?
He’s a few years older than me, so I barely even knew him when we were kids. He was always busy as a teenager, always caught up in his own world, and as soon as he was old enough, he left our family home to go do what he wanted. To fulfill his destiny, he said.
Jeffrey lives with other people who are…like him. I’m not supposed to know that he’s only my half-brother, but it’s amazing how much you can learn about your family just by listening. Adults don’t watch what they say nearly as much as they should, and by the time I was 12, I’d figured out that Jeffrey was very, very different than me.
Too different.
“No,” Grandmother coughs three times, and I bite my lip. Three coughs. Her secret signal for get the hell out of here. I always thought she was paranoid and a bit weird with her little signals and secret codes, but now I wonder if she knows something I don’t.