“Reginald,” I say.
“Yeah, okay,” Derek laughs. “What are you doing about it?”
“Nothing,” I tell him. “I trust my business model, and my staff, and our customer base trusts us. I don’t have to do anything.”
“That’s optimistic,” Chris mutters.
I give them both a baleful eye, and that conversation is done. Chris and Derek are younger than I am. When George came around, he became the only father they knew. They grew up to be his kids, that’s for sure. They’re both ruthless businessmen with one concern: money. To George, of course, that made them the successful ones.
Red Hall isn’t just a paycheck to me. It never has been. Oh, it turns a profit — I’m good at what I do — but I opened the restaurant as proof I could do it, not to get rich. I wanted something that was mine, and now I have it. More than that, Red Hall saved my life.
College was a difficult time for me. I had started out going the culinary route because I loved food and I loved to cook. What I discovered was that I was more a theoretical chef than a good chef. It had been my only dream since childhood so, naturally, discovering that I didn’t have the talent for it was crushing.
Red Hall didn’t just give me a paycheck. It gave me life, gave me a direction. It reminded me, from the day I changed majors to the day the doors finally opened, that I didn’t have to be bound by the ghost of my mother’s instability or the taint of George’s obvious borderline personality disorder. I was free the day I started dreaming.
Chris and Derek are both quiet for a moment, simmering in the now-impotent need to know how big my dick is compared to theirs and frustrated at not knowing. George casts a disapproving look my way, but I ignore it. The twins crave his approval like heroin. Not me.
By and by, dinner begins to be obviously finished. We’ve moved on from eating and talking about our own lives to comparing them to everyone else’s lives — the natural next step. Mama still hasn’t said more than a dozen words since I got here, and she’s getting more and more agitated. Soon after this, I know, she’ll end up having another panic attack.
I want to slap the twins for ignoring her in favor of George. My mother is proud of her boys, and she says it when she gets the chance. They couldn’t care less, though. Mama’s always been free with her praise and approval. George, on the other hand, always made us work for it, gave it rarely, and never without reminding us that he could withdraw it at any moment. Supply and demand. The first lesson he ever taught us.
When I’m finally full up with hearing about how someone at work was promoted over George — he didn’t deserve it, of course — and Chris’s purchase of a new hybrid that gets better gas mileage than Derek’s — and at a steal after he haggled down the salesman, no less — I stand, and gather my mother’s dishes along with my own.
She stands up with me, eager to be away from the table, too.
“I’ll handle the dishes, Mama,” I tell her when she reaches for the plates I’ve gathered. “Take a load off. It’s the least I can do.”
George eyes my mother as she leaves the room, and flashes me a nasty look before he turns his attention back on my brothers. Good. Maybe they’ll jerk each other off all night.
The task of washing dishes gives me some tangible work to focus on, even if it does lull me into a dangerous reverie where that smug bastard is still, somehow, waiting for me with those stupid smoldering eyes and that idiot’s grin. Why he’s still lodged in my brain is a mystery I don’t plan on solving.
I’m content, though, to do this work and then leave. George apparently has other plans. His heavy gait announces him like war drums. The counter creaks when he leans on it.
“Can’t even socialize with your own brothers?” he asks.
“Is that what they were doing?” I wonder out loud. “I thought it was a dick-measuring contest.”
“You didn’t have to come, you know.” From his tone, he could have been telling me I didn’t have to be born.
“Yes, I did,” I mutter, and put the next to last plate in the rack to dry.
“I’m not the one who invited you,” George growls. “You don’t have to be pissed at me about being here. For once, you could just show a little respect.”
It’s a bad time to say those words. I feel an itch in my hand, and nearly drop the plate instead of throwing it at him like I want to.
“You just make your mother worse, showing up like you do,” George goes on, oblivious to the imminent threat of concussion. “Just like your father.”
It stings. I know how to keep from showing it, but that doesn’t keep me from feeling it.
He’s wrong, though. My father made my mother’s craziness worse by leaving — not by coming around. Not that he caused it. He could only take so much of it, I guess, because eventually he got fed up and left her to go play out his midlife crisis with a rich Somalian supermodel.
At least, that’s the story I was told. Lately, I’ve been gradually getting back in touch with my father — not much, just a few Facebook messages and one or two short calls that amounted to small talk. I had tried to get Chris and Derek to join me in that, but they both refused. I suppose I can’t blame them, but… there are times when I feel isolated from the rest of the family for it.
What I can tell of my father so far? He’s a better man than George. Of course, that isn’t saying much.
“If I’m more like my father,” I tell him, “than I am you, then I’m proud of it, George.”
He snorts at me and when I turn I get the rare chance to sneer at him. “Jesus, you're pathetic.”