Page 44 of Off the Rim
"Who were those people?"
"That was my family at one time. Or rather, my step-family. My mother remarried when I was about your age."
Too many questions rush into my head at once. I don't know where to start. Dribbling slowly, I try to collect my thoughts. Dad waits patiently, the way he always does.
"Why don't I know them?"
"Well, you know how your grandma died when I was in college, right?" I nod. She was in a bad car accident, died on impact. "Her husband, my stepdad, was in the car with her. He also didn't make it."
"And the boy?" I think, remembering that the boy from the picture seemed familiar. Maybe he's a friend of the family now and I didn't know the connection? That seems unlikely, although so is my dad having an entire family he never told me about.
"Junior," my dad says. "He was my stepbrother."
"Did he die too?"
Dad shakes his head. "No, but we had a strained relationship. It wasn't always like that. We were as close as could be at one point. It was… complicated."
"Complicated how?"
"Some of it I'm not sure I understood myself, but a lot of it had to do with his own relationship with his parents. His dad hada lot of high expectations for him, and I think Junior resented my easier relationship with his dad. He also lived with his mother some of the time, and she hated that her ex-husband had remarried. Once she told their entire country club that my mother was responsible for tearing her marriage apart, even though they'd been divorced for years by the time my mother came into the picture. She called us gold diggers and filled his head with a lot of bad things. He was always worse when he came home from visiting her. "
"That's terrible."
"Like I said, complicated. In the beginning, he resented me being there, resented my mother, and let me know whenever he got the opportunity. Things were often over-competitive. I'd like to say it was one sided, but for being three years older and more mature, I engaged more than I should have. I egged him on."
"That seems pretty normal for siblings," I say, as if I know anything about what it's like to have siblings. I have a cousin I'm close with, but we never had to live together and compete for attention from our parents.
"Over time, we got along a little better, although he'd sometimes lash out after a long visit with his mom. In the six months or so before I left for college, we got pretty close. Maybe closer than we should."
My forehead scrunches. What does that mean?
Dad sighs deeply and keeps talking like he didn't just say something so cryptic. "Matilda, that was his mom's name, she didn't approve of us spending time together. She encouraged Junior's spoiled behavior, and I have a feeling she created alot of the competitiveness that Junior felt towards me and my relationship with his dad. She filled his head with paranoid ideas that my mother and I were trying to leech away their fortune. Despite being richer than God, AJ wasn't like that. He was generous with us, yes, but he was also kind and caring and never treated us like we were below him just because we didn't come from money."
He accepts my pass and attempts a free throw, shrugging when it bounces off the rim and rolls away. "She was toxic, to put it as kindly as I can." I give him a moment to collect himself while he retrieves the ball. I think I see him blink back tears as he stares down at the ball. Dribbling slowly, he makes his way to the center of the driveway.
"When our parents died, she was named the executor of the estate. Junior was only seventeen. I was twenty and in college, and suddenly my entire life was flipped upside down. Not only was my mother gone, and my stepfather, who was a good man, but so was all the support I'd come to rely on. My tuition, room and board, the account I was given for expenses. Everything was cut off."
My heart aches for the young man he was, losing everything at once like that. I can't imagine how despondent I'd be if I lost one of my parents, much less the only one I had. And then to have to deal with all the rest of that at the same time? How could anyone be so cruel?
"That's not fair. How could she get away with that?"
"No one ever discussed a will with me, so I didn't know what I could do. I didn't seem to have any legal recourse, but I felt like I should have at least been entitled to have my mother's things orbe allowed inside the house to pack up my own room. But they locked me out in every conceivable way."
"Junior didn't do anything to stand up for you?"
"That last summer, we'd had an argument that got out of hand. It was my fault."
"What happened?"
"I made some assumptions about Junior that he didn't appreciate. When he reacted poorly, I pressed. I thought I was trying to help. But when I wouldn't let it go, things escalated." Dad runs his fingers along the scruff on the edge of his jaw. There's a scar there that I know he got from fighting when he was young. I always thought he meant like a playground fight in elementary school, but without him telling me, I know that's not the case. This Junior guy gave him that scar.
"Seems like he took after his mom," I say sourly, not liking the idea of someone hurting my dad, or making him as sad as he looks right now. Hell, in this moment, he’s almost as upset as the day he closed up his store for good and watched it get bulldozed in the same afternoon.
"You can't really blame him. He was under a lot of pressure."
"And you weren't?"
"Until our parents died, not really. I lived an easy life, worrying about nothing except my studies and how I was going to get Julia Flores to give me the time of day." He waggles his eyebrows playfully, and I'm glad for the moment of levity. It doesn't last long.
