Chapter 4 - The Brother's Desperation
On Sunday morning, while Micah was at a birthday party for a school classmate, a sharp knocking echoed against my front door.
I opened it to find Ross.
My twenty-six-year-old brother looked terrible. He was wearing an unwashed hoodie, his eyes were bloodshot, and he smelled faintly of cheap cigarettes and stale coffee. He looked as though he hadn't slept in three days.
"Brendan," he choked out, stepping uninvited into my entryway. "You have to help me, man. You have to."
I closed the door, standing near the coat rack. "What happened, Ross?"
"The tow truck came this morning," Ross said, his voice cracking with genuine panic. "They repossessed my car right out of Mom's driveway at 6:00 AM! The guy said the account was sixty days past due and the authorization had been revoked by the primary payer!"
"I revoked the authorization on December 23rd," I said.
"Brendan, I need that car!" Ross grabbed his own hair, pacing back and forth across my small entryway. "I have a job interview tomorrow at a logistics firm in Dublin! How am I supposed to get to Dublin without a car?!"
"There’s a COTA bus line that runs from the corner near Mom's house directly to Dublin," I said plainly. "It takes forty-five minutes."
Ross stopped pacing, staring at me with open disgust. "The bus?! You want me to take the bus to a professional job interview?!"
"I took the bus to my first logistics job for two years, Ross," I reminded him. "I didn't have a brother paying four hundred and fifty dollars a month for a late-model sedan while I worked on my 'fresh start' for sixteen months."
"You're my brother!" Ross yelled, his voice echoing in the small hallway. "You have a high-paying job! You have money saved up! What is sixteen hundred dollars to you?! It's pocket change!"
"It's not about the money, Ross," I said. "It's about the fact that while my son sat at that table with gravy running down his neck, you looked at the bread basket and muttered that this is why we can't have nice things."
Ross blinked, his jaw dropping. "I was talking about the dish! I was talking about Mom breaking the serving dish!"
"No, you weren't," I said coldly. "You were blaming a nine-year-old child for being attacked by your mother so you wouldn't risk her mood disrupting your free ride."
"That's crazy!" Ross shouted. "Mom was crazy that night! Everyone knows she was crazy! Why am I being punished for what Mom did?!"
"Because you lived off my labor for sixteen months without once thanking me, without once asking how Micah was doing, and without standing up for your nephew when he was humiliated in front of you," I said.
Ross stood there, his chest heaving, his face contorted in anger and shock. "You're a selfish jerk, Brendan. Mom was right about you. You think you're better than everyone else just because you went to college and got a white-collar job!"
"I don't think I'm better than anyone," I said quietly, opening the front door wide. "I just don't pay for people who hate me anymore. Get out of my house, Ross."
Ross stared at the open door, then at me. He realized, perhaps for the first time in his life, that his elder brother was not going to rescue him.
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"You're going to regret this," Ross hissed as he stepped out onto the breezeway. "When Mom and Dad lose the house, it's going to be on your conscience!"
"The house isn't mine to lose," I said, and closed the door.