The Best Short Stories 2021 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Joan Silber

Freedom from Want

My brother’s longtime boyfriend decided to leave him, once and for all. Enough, he said, was enough. If you can’t stop arguing after twenty years, when will you ever? Time for a new start for both of them. They would always be friends, of course. He would always care about Saul, but he really did not think that waking up every day in the same apartment was good for either of them.

This speech might have made sense except that my brother had just been diagnosed with some stage or other of liver cancer. (It was hard to get a full story out of Saul.) And the apartment, in the upper reaches of Manhattan, belonged to Kirk, the boyfriend. My brother, a fifty-seven-year-old librarian with no personal savings, was going to have to find a new place to live. For however long he planned to do that.

I was stunned and outraged by the news, maybe more than my brother was. Why had I ever liked Kirk? I had, I always had. With his deep voice, his good haircuts, his quiet merciless jokes. He called me Sister Susie (my name is Rachel, the name was his kidding). Sister Susie was a perky lass, always getting into the gin on the sly. We had a whole set of stories about her and her unusual relations with her dog Spot. Some of his friends thought I was really called Susie.

How could you decide to break up with someone who had a mortal illness? Who could do such a thing? Kirk could.

“The man is a fuck-head,” I said to Saul. “And he has no honor.”

“We never got along that well,” Saul said. “Remember when he picked a fight with me in front of the entire Brooklyn library staff? He was always a pain. And you know how full of himself he’s been. He thinks being a digital art director is like being Michelangelo—I always laughed at the way he used the word creative. Don’t make a big deal out of this. It’s not the end of the world.”

Kirk had not given him any particular deadline for moving out, and everyone in New York knew couples who stayed together for years after breaking up, while prices rose and good deals slipped away. Meanwhile Kirk and my brother were sharing the same bed every night and were—I gleaned from my brother’s remarks—still having what could be called sexual contact. I didn’t blame Saul for mentioning it either, showing off a last bit of swagger. And maybe the breakup was just an idea, a flash-in-the pan theory.

Maybe Kirk didn’t mean it.

“He says I’m lazy about being sick,” Saul said. “I should do more, be proactive. Has anyone used that word since 1997?”

“What is it with him?” I said. “I don’t get it.”

“He’s seeing someone new,” Saul said.

“He’s what?” I said. I had to stop wailing in protest, because it was useless and only increased my brother’s suffering. He had his ties to Kirk; he didn’t want to hear what I had to say.

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