Lubrican Short Stories Vol 3 by Thomas Thorsen

Author:Thomas Thorsen [Thomas Thorsen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter One

Brother-in-law.

Uncle.

Both are titles that don't mean all that much when they are first awarded to you. In both cases, you have no experience at being one, so you usually have few, if any preconceptions of what is expected.

I suppose becoming a brother-in-law is the easier of the two, in the sense that you understand romantic relationships, and you can be happy for your brother when he finds a nice girl. Unless you wish you had the nice girl and he had a wart on his nose. But if he met her at college, while you were going to a trade school to become a computer guru, then you never had the chance to lust after her while he was dating her as, I am told, sometimes happens.

Now the uncle thing, if you have kids of your own, is probably no big deal either. But if you don't have a wife and kids, and have been a confirmed bachelor all your life, then being an uncle can be a wild and crazy ride.

Of course, if your brother found himself a genuine 'keeper,' and she bore him a daughter who was cute as a button, and who wrapped her uncle around her little finger by the time she was five or six, all those questions you had way back when it all first happened seem far away and inconsequential.

But they're not.

When my brother Kit died, it was hard on all of us. I suppose, as his brother, the fact that he died serving his country made it a little easier for me to deal with. By that I mean it was better than some random, senseless thing like a drunk driver, or a tree falling on him, or lightning striking.

Of course it wasn't that way for Beth, who had lost her partner, lover, and life mate. They say there are five stages of grief, and she did them all with a vengeance. Actually, her grief made mine a little easier, because my motto was "Anything to help" and I was sort of distracted a little bit by taking care of things while she fell apart.

One of those things was Heather, my niece.

We lived next door to each other, and I'm self employed. So, when we first got the word, it was

relatively easy for me to just sort of stay there for the first two weeks. Heather was six at the time, and knew something bad had happened, but not what. I didn't feel like it was my place to tell her, but I did feel like I should give Beth time to get through what she was going through, so I just concentrated on that. Heather was scared, because her mom wasn't acting right. So that first night, when she fell asleep on me where we sat on the couch, that's where we both slept that night.

As it turned out, I did end up explaining to her why Daddy wasn't coming home, when Beth asked me to. She didn't want to bawl in front of her little girl.

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