“What do you want to do with Dad’s house and things?” she asked, cutting right to the chase.
With a heavy sigh, Jack told her, “I don’t know, Gillian.”
“Well, it’s something we have to think about, Jack, it’s not just going to take care of itself.” Gillian kicked her heels off and put her feet up on a chair and then took a sip from the glass of red wine she had poured for herself.
“It’s not something we have to think about right this second,” Jack insisted, the annoyance clear in his voice.
“I have to get back to my children on Wednesday,” she replied tightly. “This isn’t something I can just put off.”
“Jesus, Gillian,” Jack exclaimed. “Don’t worry about it, okay? I’ll take care of it, sell all of Dad’s shit and then send you a check!” He took another sip of his beer and then slammed the bottle down on the glass tabletop, resisting the desire to punch his sister once again.
“Take it easy,” she urged, her voice more gentle now. “I don’t want to fight, Jack. I’m sorry; this just came at a bad time. Sophie is sick with an ear infection and Mark-”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jack interrupted, not having even the faintest amount of patience to listen to his sister complain. Her husband, Mark, owned a boat design and manufacturing company and made millions. Even with a full time nanny and cook, Gillian still found ways to gripe about her life and Jack was in no mood to hear it.
Gillian sat quietly for a minute and tried to sympathize with her little brother. She knew he was going to take their father’s death badly. Jack may have stopped talking to their father like she did, but unlike her, he felt badly about it. It’s not that she wasn’t at all sad about his death, but Gillian had cut herself off emotionally from her dad years ago.
“So, your girlfriend is coming down tonight?” she asked, trying to lighten the mood with small talk.
“Yes, and so help me, Gillian, you better be nice to her,” Jack threatened, fixing his cold, blue eyes on her hazel ones.
“Of course I’ll be nice, what do you take me for?” she huffed. Gillian knew she was a lot of things but rude to people she just met wasn’t one of them. “Although,” she added with a laugh, “I have to know, what’s wrong with her?”
“What the hell do you mean?” Jack spat.
“You know what I mean,” Gillian insisted. She cocked her head to the side and gave her brother a knowing look.
“No, I don’t know what you mean, what the hell are you talking about?” Jack could feel his blood pressure rising with each word he said and angry adrenaline started to pump through him.
“I mean,” Gillian explained with a roll of her eyes, “that you always find girls who are troubled, to say the least. You have a hero complex, little brother.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” he repeated, his voice rising along with his anger.
“Oh, come on,” his sister laughed, clearly ignoring the fact that she was upsetting her brother. “You’re always looking to save someone, Jack, and your relationships have always been full of drama.”
“That is not true, you don’t know what the hell you’re saying,” Jack seethed.
“Really? Let’s put aside the girls you dated in high school; teen girls are always full of drama but even as an adult, Jack, girlfriends and friends, you are forever taking it upon yourself to fix them somehow. Look at Stacy, she had all those problems with her ex stalking her and you took care of it. When the trouble died down you two broke up. I hate to tell ya, Jack, but you thrive on drama. You’re like a drama king.” Gillian laughed at her joke while Jack just got more furious.
“That’s one example, that hardly gives me a hero complex,” he growled.
“Whatever,” Gillian snickered, “but if you think back to all of your relationships with other people, you’ll see that I’m right. Even with Dad, Jack, you wanted to save him, and when he wouldn’t play into your little rescue fantasy, you gave up on him!”