The Dumb Brother

The world has its winners and its losers. Gran always said that. Sometimes, to turn your luck around, you need to make a difficult decision. They’re difficult for this reason. Hey. No one wants to make them. But you have to sometimes. Otherwise, how are you going to be a winner? Yes, that’s it. It’s decided. It’s what the old woman would have wanted anyway. She’d rather know her two boys are happy and she’s six feet under than be alive and know we’re doing crap. Joey and I are doing crap.

He quit his job at the supermarket. He says it’s a matter of justice. I am happy for him, but we cannot afford justice. People are being rude to him lately, he says, and no one cares about safety measures anyway. He’s scared when they get close, he says. Scared, yeah. That’s what my brother is. Every day. For every single thing. Scared!

That’s why he won’t do it. That’s why he refuses to wave the good woman a last goodbye. We’d be doing her a favor, I keep sayin’. What good is she stuck in that elderly home, forgetting what she had for breakfast, living day by day with goldfish misery to deal with? Joey says I talk like a madman. I think he’s the mad one. Not me.

What does he care about old gran anyway? All of a sudden, here he is, saying we shouldn’t put the old woman out of her misery. Where was he when gran was bringing me up? Oh, yeah. He was in school, that’s where. The gifted brother. Every family has one. And all of ‘em treat him better than the other poor fella. But the law doesn’t see it this way. Oh, no. Gran told me once: listen, kid, when I go, I’ll give you and your brother 50-50. You two get everything I have. Provided, she said, you don’t get to fight wi’ each other about it. That’s out of the question.

And look at us now, fighting before the thing even happened.

Mark doesn’t understand. I told Betty about his crazy idea this morning. Betty agrees with him. Your brother, she says, is crazy. There, I said it.

When I told him I had told Betty, he reacted like a freak would. He spent 5 minutes yelling at me on the phone, saying I had ruined it now that she knew of the plan. Mark, I said, there was no plan to begin with.

I always knew my brother was, to use a euphemism, different. He never got along in school. Or in kindergarten. Or in any place that wasn’t grandma’s house. But to get to this level? To turn against the old woman herself? I was shocked when he first told me.

It was a Sunday lunch. Since grandma got sick, Mark spends Sundays with us. It was her request that he did so, which means he couldn’t say no. This Sunday lunch thing has been going on for a while now. Anyway, Sunday lunch: a truly blissful moment of the week. I had no other occasion, so I told him I got fired.

It wasn’t entirely true. After working myself up for 10 years, I was finally leaving. I learned on that day they were promoting from the outside. Even if it hadn’t been so, no one would have gone so far as to mention my name. I quit.

Mark knew, Betty had told him already. You know what Mark answered?

In this economy? He said. You quit your job…in this economy? And on New Year’s day! You wanted Betty to have a heart attack, didn’t you? There are hardly any vacancies out there, and bills need paying, and you have a mortgage, and there’s your wife, and your kids,…. He wouldn’t stop yelling.

He was wrong. He couldn’t know, as I knew, of the abuses I had received in that damned place until then. That promotion bullshit was the last straw for me. Leaving would be my first fulfilled New Year’s resolution. Freedom, at last.

Mark was also right. Of course, I knew he was right about the job market, and rent, and bills. Sometimes I had to remind myself he was the dumb one. For being dumb, he was extremely rational sometimes.

You can imagine the emotional toils I was already going through at that point…Betty, the kids, the bills. And I was without a job!

And that’s when he dropped the bomb.

Easy, he says. There is a way out. You and I have always known that, when the time came, we could always count on gran’s inheritance. The cottage. The flat in Manhattan. The credit at the bank.

I was confused. Judging by grandma’s health, those things were ten, fifteen years away. How could they possibly solve our problems now?

Easy, easy. (I hate it when he says that, easy). We kill the old woman. Give her a proper last goodbye. Then it’s sorted.

I laughed. That was typical of Mark, to drop jokes after jokes when things got critical. Instead of facing the harsh truth, he’d laugh in its face instead. Everything can go away if you have a good laugh!

I had a good laugh. Then I looked at him again.

I’m dead serious, he says. And he went on about his crazy plan. Because it’s crazy, nothing else. Our grandma has raised us – him – as if we were her own children. The fact that she’s old and the cogs in her brain don’t work anymore doesn’t mean we should…God! I can’t even think of that.

But, of course, Mark knows best. Oh, yes. He’ll tell you: that’s what she’d want. As if he knew what she wants. I am horrified, thinking that this idea could even cross his mind. I don’t have the guts to think about it. I don’t even have time. I’m running late to the meeting with the bank. This meeting will declare mine and my brother’s fate.

It’s a humid Saturday afternoon. While the birds and bugs enjoy their deserved siesta, Joey and Mark drive four hundred miles, all the way to the border.

Felicia Arragoz is stirring up from her afternoon knitting as a nurse comes in, announcing to the old abuelita that her two grandsons have come to visit.

While they wait at the door, they exchange looks.

‘I brought the axe, just in case’, Mark whispers.

Joey fulminates him with a single glance. ‘Stop it’, he mutters.

The nurse moves two chairs towards the brown armchair where the old lady sits. ‘You can come in.’

The old woman asks her, once again, who’s come to visit.

‘It’s your grandsons, Señora Arragoz’, the nurse answers patiently.

The two step in. Mark looks around, touches the objects lying undisturbed on the great marble shelf that looks like it's come straight out of a 70s furniture catalog.

Joey walks clumsily towards the old woman, stumbling on a piece of unrecognizable, soft something on the floor.

‘Watch out’, the old woman says, and pulls the thread towards her chest.

Under Joey’s nervous scrutiny, Mark bends to pick up the yarn ball. He gives it back to the old gran, leaving a kiss on her forehead.

She gestures them to sit.

When they take their seats, the young nurse leaves, closing the door behind her.

‘So?’ the old woman sighs. She still wonders what these two young men want from her.

Joey spends the first five minutes of the interview boring the old woman with his usual chit-chat and small talk. Mark cuts through the chase.

‘We’re here about money matters’, Mark announces.

Joey tightens his fists, trying to look away from his dumb brother, who not only is dumb, but is also incapable of any nicety.

‘Joey decided this was the best time to quit his job’, Mark adds.

Joey is flaming now. It is good, he thinks, after all, that Mark brought the axe. He might use it later.

Señora Arragoz stirs up. As if jumping out of a picture book, the conversation between the two has made the distinction between the two boys clearer: here sit Mark, her favorite, and Joey, clearly the dumb one.

In light of this realization, she nods, more to herself than to the other two.

‘Yes, but we requested a loan to the bank today. If you could tell us…If you could tell us what grandpa’s accounts were. Maybe we can use his name to move the bank to help us. It’s quite a lot of money we’re needing.’

Joey spits it all out in what Mark thinks is an unprecedented act of bravery on behalf of his brother. When Joey turns towards him, looking for his approval, he just nods. There is nothing to add.

Gran knows the financial hell that tends to follow their family, haunting its generations like a cursed alma. When it was her grandfather, he bought a square of land that had given its previous owners thousands in profit. Two months after that deal was signed, the earth had dried and the business had stopped. When it was her parents, they had gone through two wars, made it out of both alive and well, only to lose all their savings and their house, even their dog, to the debt they had accumulated during the great depression.

Money, for some reason, tended to gravitate miles away from that family. Señora Arragoz knew that.

She also knew something nasty was bound to happen to the loan the two boys had requested. Maybe it would work at first, yes, but what havoc it might cause in the future only time could tell. She probably wouldn’t be there to see it. She’d be up there, with el creador, laughing and smoking cigars. She would die as she had lived: tranquila. Without a single worry in the world.

In fact, while that unforgiving financial curse affected the rest of her family, every single one of them, it never touched her. Felicia Arragoz, for some reason, never had a bad day with coins in her purse. She invested, sowing and reaping when the season looked good, and her good head and strong arms had made her a cottage, one loft in the heart of New York City and many savings, more than an old woman and two boys could ever spend in a lifetime.

It seemed only natural, to the woman, that her two grandsons would have thought about her before committing to their crazy plan.

Nasty is always around the corner, she thinks to herself, when banks are involved. Once her thoughts bring her back to the here and now, she nods gravely. Just once.

‘I understand’, she murmurs. Then, all of a sudden, her serious expression leaves way to a sardonic smile on her faded lips.

‘Pero, my boys’, she starts amusedly, ‘you could have saved yourself this trouble. You could have just killed me instead.’

Soon, the old señora’s laugh can be heard from every room of the facility, echoing from one wall to the other. The only ones who aren’t laughing are two young boys, sitting by the old, amused woman: Mark, thinking about his axe, and Joey, thinking – for once – maybe he’s the dumb brother.