Excuse Me While I Disappear by Joanna Scott

Author:Joanna Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2021-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

Teardrop

He came to the door wearing Bermuda shorts and a Jockey undershirt, gripping a ribbed tumbler I assumed was full of water. Only after he stumbled over the weather strip and I accepted his damp hand to shake did I put two and two together: the liquid in his glass was his beloved Smirnoff, poured from a bottle I knew he kept in the freezer because I had seen him reach for it at parties when he was mixing up a round of screwdrivers.

We were all drinkers in our extended family, but my brother-in-law had emerged over the past year as the only full-fledged drunk among us. I congratulated myself on foreseeing his decline. I had always thought he was a loser.

I did not say aloud, My sister had a dozen better men vying for her love, and she made the mistake of choosing you. Instead, I asked him, “How are you?”

“Hanging in there,” he said, pulling his hand from my grip and covering his mouth in a failed attempt to muffle himself as he cleared his throat.

As I stood there awkwardly, waiting for him to invite me inside, his vaguely wearied expression suddenly lit with interest. I turned to see what he was looking at just as Bob, the family cat, crept from behind the trunk of an old hemlock in the front yard, stalking an invisible prey in the pine needles.

“Is Jody ready?”

My question stirred my brother-in-law to action. “Jo!” he howled into the house. “Jo, your aunt is here!”

I heard a distant thud, and Jody’s voice yelling in reply. “Be there in a sec!”

“What do you hear from Ellie?” I asked. Ellie, my sister, was in the hospital, recovering from a double mastectomy.

“She’s coming home tomorrow morning,” he said, which I already knew, since I had visited her the previous day, and every day before that. Today was the only day I would not visit my sister in the hospital, for I had agreed to her request to concentrate on her daughter, who might need, my sister suggested, a little extra attention.

“I would pick Sis up myself, but I have to go into the office early,” I said, while with my eyes I reminded my brother-in-law that he was a lazy pig who had lost his job back in December and had settled contentedly into dependence upon his wife, an overworked high school social studies teacher. And now that my sister had cancer, my brother-in-law could think of nothing else to do but fill his glass with booze.

“No problem, we’re all set. Whoa there!” He staggered, causing his morning aperitif to slosh over the rim, as Jody, dressed in a polka-dot T-shirt and denim overalls with grass stains on both knees, squeezed between her father and the doorway and leaped into my arms.

“My little lady!”

“My bestest auntie!”

“I’m your only auntie.” I spit on my fingers and rubbed the dirt smudge off her cheek.

“And you’re my bestest papa!” she said, leaning out of my arms in an appeal

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