Oh, Brother. (Flash Fiction)

He called five times in three days. This prompted me to consider he had something very important to share. Once the lines connected and the baby was quiet in the background, I heard him tell me Mom needed more protein.

“She is carb loading,” my bro stated as if reading directions from a pasta box.

“Are you checking her stools?” I returned. “Why would you know that?”

“She just needs more protein, Aim.”

“What are you really saying? I should cook more salmon when they arrive?” I said as I mentally perused my frozen meat selection in the deep freezer in our garage. The chest freezer that we bought from Sears after I decided to breastfeed our first-born and assumed it was going to pour out like a waterfall. Turned out, the normal freezer attached to the fridge would have been just fine. Something else La Leche Leaguers don’t mention is that, for 80% of the population, breastfeeding is like squeezing liquid from a 2x4.

My brother’s explanation of Mom’s apparent all-bread diet failed to go any deeper and life with our family was much like this. Talking in the margins. We all secretly hated each other but knew it was more complicated to cut off all the relationships completely than to just work around what you had.

In a nervous reaction to incomplete information, I started going off about my current gluten-free diet like a born again Christian. “It’s my new naturopath,” I couldn’t stop. “She wants me gluten and dairy-free for three months and then I can slowly reintroduce these foods and see if there’s any negative reaction.”

Silence.

“So if you’re saying Mom needs more protein then I can accommodate that when they visit next week,” I kept talking because I assumed the other line was now dead. “Because I have to really watch my own protein intake now that cheese and dairy are off the table.”

“Well I just wanted to mention that about Mom before I forgot to tell you,” Brother sighed as if trying to cleanse his ears from the waste I had just spewed his way. His reaction then was much the same as during his own Über Christian Period when he was in either judgment or disgust at everything I said aloud.

The Über Christian Period started once he completed the paperwork to attend Oral Roberts University with a complete straight face. He graduated, three years later, with an MBA and a penchant for silent prayer and speaking in tongues. Though our relationship was always limited to the weather and shared memories of what our other brother did that was funny or entertaining, we had to work hard to speak directly with one another. Something changed in him along the way, though, and he sought a relationship with me that usually included reflection on and a response to what I was actually saying.

“Also, make sure Dad has shade during the hottest points in the day,” Brother offered.

“Okay, because he’s a hot house flower?” I furrowed my brow on purpose just so it could be heard through the delicate satellite frequencies.

“Well he has had a lot of skin cancer,” He flatly stated with an eye roll back at me.

I knew that he was referring to our patio and its lack of any shade except in the square shadows from the pergola. I also knew that he was gently suggesting we DO something to provide appropriate shade from the long hot sunny days that would be encroaching during our parents’ visit. But the fact that he was engineering this from Atlanta and being all first born and responsible gave me a bad feeling. Instead of empathy toward our parents’ aging bodies, I felt something adolescent and rebellious creeping up in me and I didn’t want to be accommodating. Whatever I was about to say was, once again, rebellious.

I could hear his expression while I spoke: Dear God, please don’t let her go to hell.