Aftershock by Judy Melinek

Author:Judy Melinek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2020-11-19T18:32:57+00:00

* * *

I met Tommy at a Korean barbecue place on Geary Boulevard. Tommy eats like a machine and burns off the calories with massive daily brainwork, I guess. I don’t know how else he does it, because he doesn’t like exercise and he doesn’t do much else than sit in front of a computer and work. Work is always some top-secret tech start-up that he’s been called upon to rescue from the terrible coding skills of lesser beings. I hardly even bothered asking anymore. I never understood a damn word of what he said about any of these jobs, and he certainly didn’t like to hear shop talk from the ol’ autopsy suite, so we generally ate in silence unless we had something important to say.

After we had been seated and placed our order, Tommy found a question worth asking.

“Why you so dressed up?”

“Because, damn it, I look pretty.”

The waitress brought a draft beer for me and a root beer for teetotaler Tommy, and I told him all about the Diwali fiasco. Tommy was sympathetic to me, of course—but also wasn’t as hard on Anup as I wanted him to be.

“Pleasing parents from the old country can be challenging,” he said with grim irony.

“No shit.” I raised my beer. “Na zdrowie.”

“Sto lat.”

We clinked.

“I spoke to Mamusia yesterday,” I said.

“I know. She called to tell me.”

“Hold on—she called you to tell you that I’d called her?”

“That you’d finally called her. She’s been calling me every day since the quake to tell me you hadn’t called yet.”

“That’s not why she was calling you.”

“I know.”

“It was your reward for being a good boy.”

“Jessie, I know.”

“Did Mamusia tell you she broke her wrist?”

“She what—?”

“Yup. Splint and everything. She hasn’t been working.”

“Then how’s she buying groceries?”

“Tommy. You think I asked?”

He sighed. “No.”

“Because...?”

“She wouldn’t have told you.”

Our meal came in the nick of time—before I lost control of my temper and lit into my brother. He’d offer money to support Mamusia, sure. He made more than I did, lived frugally, and had no debt load. He could afford it. Tommy never offered our mother anything other than checks, though. He had left Lynn before I did. He ran off to California right out of high school, with nothing but his mad coding skills and a pile of chutzpah. He had never been back.

Part of me didn’t blame him and part of me hated him for his ability to shut our entire childhood into a box and lock it away. Somebody had to take care of Mamusia. She was going to be aged out of the workplace soon enough—or fall out of it, if she was injuring herself without telling anybody. She had one brother and two sisters in Poland. I’d never met those aunts and that uncle, and Mamusia had never met their kids. She was a US citizen and had been for decades, but she held no passport and had no interest in going back to visit the old country. Danuta Repczynska had left

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