“How are you feeling?” I ask.
“Nice try,” Danna answers.
She hates the question. The few times I’ve gotten her to answer it for me have been when I’ve slipped it haphazardly into the middle of a conversation.
As you can see, though, it doesn’t always work.
“You look good,” I tell her. “You’ve got some color to your cheeks.”
“Will you stop?” she asks. “You know I hate it when you do that.”
“What are little brothers for?” I ask. “It’s our job to torment our older sisters.”
“Any chance there’s any leeway for the fact that I’m less than five minutes older than you?” she asks.
“Not really,” I tell her. “Anything else going on?”
“Yeah,” she says, “there’s been a woman standing at the buzzer to the gate acting like she’s not sure whether or not she should press the button.”
I flip around and look out the window.
I can’t tell too much about the woman, as I’m looking at her through a gate and from a distance, but Danna was right. I was hoping it was just a jogger who needed a break to tie a shoe or something like that, but the woman is definitely here for one of us, and Danna’s not the breadwinner of this particular house.
“What should I do?” Danna asks.
“Just stay inside,” I tell her as I pull the phone out of my pocket, “and if things start getting crazy, call the police.”
I hand the phone to Danna and, although she tries to stop me, I manage to work my way free of her grip, and I walk out the front door.
There’s got to be something I can do to increase visibility from the front door to the mailbox.
“Excuse me!” I call out to the person staring at the buzzer.
I’m expecting the woman to run or go for some kind of weapon, but she just turns and walks up to the fence.
“Damian, I’m sorry, I didn’t know where else to go,” Penelope, Jamie’s mother, says.
“Shit, it’s you!” I exclaim. “Hold on a second and I’ll let you in.”
I make my way to my side of the gate and type in my code on the little keypad to open it.
The gate slowly grinds over the concrete as it opens. I should really get that thing fixed: it’s missing a wheel.
“What brings you here today, Penelope?” I ask. “I didn’t miss your call, did I?”
“I wasn’t sure if I was going to hit the buzzer,” she says. “I wasn’t sure if I was going to tell you.”
“What’s going on?” I ask, as she comes through the gate and we embrace on the other side.
“It’s Ed,” she says. “He’s had another heart attack and the doctors are starting to act like he might not be coming back from the hospital this time.”
“That’s terrible,” I respond.
Ed.
Fucking Ed.
Ed is Jamie’s father, and there wasn’t a moment since I met the guy where he could find it in himself to tolerate my existence.