Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [21]
Considering the fact that he’d spent the last four weeks as live bait, I hadn’t minded his unkempt appearance at first; I’d begun to wonder, however, whether he hadn’t been wearing the same variation of two outfits since arriving. Or maybe it was his scent that alarmed me, an odor pungent but seductive, like upturned, sun-baked earth.
“I want to meet this Eli.” I held the phone an inch from my ear; Brian had my mother’s volume. He was five years younger than me but insisted on acting like a big brother. “Are you charging him rent?”
“No, we’re not charging him rent,” I said. “I thought he was just visiting for the weekend.”
“You need a timeline. A plan for eviction. You don’t just let people come live with you. What if your landlord finds out?”
“She won’t find out. You’re starting to sound like Mom.”
I hadn’t meant to talk about Eli and I certainly hadn’t meant to jeopardize my brother’s good mood. He and Marie were registering for wedding gifts. “Amebuger!” he’d shouted into the phone when he picked up. “Vacuum cleaner with or without the central dust segregator?”
Direct contact with my brother had become a rare thing since he started medical school. When he wasn’t in lecture, he was in the library. I couldn’t remember the last time we hadn’t held a conversation in whispers.
“How’s Marie doing?” I asked to change the subject.
He asked her. “She says she’s surviving, how are you? She’s still in family med, so her schedule is good. She’d be better if Mom wasn’t driving her crazy.”
“Wedding stuff?”
“You’d think napkin anagrams were the be-all end-all.”
“Monograms,” I corrected.
“Whatever. She’s making Marie nuts.”
We discussed their honeymoon plans and our mother’s relative insanity with all things wedding. When the conversation hit a lull, I worried the button on my blouse.
“Brian,” I began, tentative. “I told the chair of the department I would teach again next semester.”
There was a pause.
“So no planned escapes from Copenhagen?”
“I don’t have the money—or the prospects. Do you think it’s a mistake to stay?”
“A mistake? They pay you, right? And you get to write your stories, right? Sounds like a good setup to me.”
“I don’t think I’m any good at it.”
“Amy.You’re a great writer.”
“No, I mean the teaching. I’m terrible.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I know it.”
“That’s enough. Those kids love you.”
“Really?” I asked piteously; Brian was the only person around with whom I had no shame.
“If nothing else, at least you have all the time in the world to write.” He spoke away from the receiver: “Baby! Rice cooker! We need this. Need it. No, I’m serious. Did you zap it?”
“I can let you go,” I said. He didn’t answer. I sighed and waited, twirling red circles on the back of a student’s essay.
He came back to the phone five minutes later. “Marie wants to know if you heard about Mom’s new boyfriend.”
I made him repeat what he’d just said.
“Well, maybe not boyfriend yet. But they’re going out. Every Friday night to Olive Garden.”
When I pressed him for details, he said I should just talk to Mom myself. He had to get back to stainless-steel cutlery but would call again later. I hung up reluctantly knowing he was unlikely to make good on his word. I’d lost my brother in two phases: first to medical school, then to a woman. I was lying when I pretended it didn’t affect me every time I called and got his voicemail.
Communicating with my family was like playing a game of telephone around a summer campfire, only there were no marshmallows and nobody was laughing. Approximately twenty-three hours after explaining the Eli situation to Brian, Mom called to inquire why in heaven’s name Zoë was giving lifts to gypsies.
“Grandma says he has some kind of biblical name. Abraham? Micah?”
“Are you talking about Eli?” I asked.
“That’s it. Eli. What’s this business about Eli.”
It took me half an hour to disentangle what Brian had said to Marie, what Marie mentioned to Grandma, and what Mom had chosen to hear from Grandma’s final account. I told her that one of Zoë’s close friends had come to visit