Home for the Summer

by Holly Chamberlin

  “Hello?” she said, answering the call with a frown.

  “Gince, it’s me. Tommy. Your brother. Oh, right. You know that. Look, I need help with Mom.”

  “What do you mean help?” Gincy asked. He’s going to ask for money again, she thought. Nothing ever changed with Tommy. There were three things you could count on in this world. Death. Taxes. And Tommy never changing.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said. “The other night I was over at Mom’s house for dinner and the potatoes were, like, half cooked. And she didn’t even notice. And the milk had gone sour. You know how crazy she is about milk being fresh. The second she thinks it’s going off, bam, right down the sink.”

  What’s the big deal about half-cooked potatoes or sour milk? Gincy thought. Neither seemed to warrant this call for help from her brother. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” she said.

  “And there’s kind of a musty smell in the upstairs hallway.”

  Gincy resisted rolling her eyes. “Did you try opening a few windows in the rooms along the hall to let in some fresh air?”

  “Oh,” Tommy said. “No. But the worst thing is that the electric company turned off Mom’s lights just because she forgot to pay last month’s bill. I mean, how can they do that to an old lady?”

  Gincy sighed. “That’s not how it works, Tommy. Look, did she eventually pay the bill? Does she have power back?”

  “Yeah. But I think it freaked her out. I mean, she didn’t say that she was freaked out, but I could tell. She never forgets stuff.”

  He was right about that, Gincy thought. Her mother had a mind like a steel trap when it came to things like paying bills and balancing her budget. “Did she actually tell you she forgot to pay the bill?” she asked. “How did you find out?”

  “I went over there one morning and she was upset that the toaster wasn’t working and that the coffeepot wasn’t perking or whatever and she said that a bunch of lightbulbs had burned out overnight and I said, That’s weird, maybe you forgot to pay the electric bill. I meant it as a joke but she went all white and that’s what it was, she’d forgotten.”

  Gincy wondered what other bills her mother might have neglected to pay. Worse, she wondered what money Ellen might have been conned into giving away to some bogus charity or stranded African prince. It happened all the time. There was always someone around pathetic and immoral enough to bilk the elderly. The situation could, in fact, be serious.

  “Okay, Tommy,” she said. “I’ll call her this evening, though I’m not sure what I’ll be able to find out.”

  “Thanks, Gince,” Tommy said. “Look, don’t tell her I called, okay? She made me promise not to tell you about the electric bill but . . .”

  “Don’t worry, Tommy. I won’t say a word.”

  “Thanks again, Gince,” he said, and Gincy could hear the unmistakable relief in his voice. “I owe you one.”

  * * *

  It was no good. An hour after the disturbing call from her brother, Gincy still couldn’t concentrate on correcting grammar and tightening sentence structure. Her conscience, that annoyingly vigilant thing, was bothering her.

  The fact was that she had not been back to Appleville since her father’s funeral. And apart from her usual biweekly call to her mother and an obligatory call on Thanksgiving, she had had no further correspondence with her. Come to think of it, Gincy realized, Ellen hadn’t sent them a card at Thanksgiving. That was odd. Maybe her mother, always frugal, had simply committed to further belt tightening now that her husband was gone. Or maybe sending a Thanksgiving card was something else that had slipped her mind.

  And as for her brother . . . The last time Gincy had spoken to Tommy was during the course of their father’s funeral, and that communication had been limited to her asking questions like, “Who was that man sitting two rows behind us at the wake, the one with the plaid jacket and bad toupee?” to which Tommy had replied with a shrug. Limited communication wasn’t unusual for the Gannon siblings. Most every time Gincy did engage with her brother, she was left feeling frustrated, annoyed, or downright angry. He just never seemed to listen, and when he did listen he turned everything into a joke or he dismissed what she was saying with a grin and a shrug, even when a more appropriate answer might be “Thanks, Gincy, for asking about my friend’s chemotherapy” or “Hey, Gincy, that’s great news about the new job.” When possible, she avoided conversation with people who routinely provoked such unpleasant feelings in her.

  But now, at the distance of half a year, she remembered that at their father’s funeral Tommy had seemed . . . What was it? Lost? Scared?

  At the time she hadn’t given his state of mind any thought. First there had been the wake to survive, two interminable three-hour viewings a day for two days straight, during which time she and her mother had shaken hands with what seemed like hundreds of sympathetic well-wishers. Then had come the funeral at the church her mother had taken to frequenting in the last few years, followed by a visit to the cemetery, where at her father’s grave the assistant pastor of the church had spoken a few additional words of comfort. Gincy had been too wrapped up in her own feelings of sadness and loss, too concerned with her role as her mother’s representative with the funeral director, and too focused on giving what comfort she could to her children to pay any attention to her brother.

  Thomas Edward Gannon, now forty-five years of age. For the past decade he had lived in a tiny apartment in an aluminum-sided house in the run-down section of Appleville, the owners of which hadn’t bothered to mow the miniscule lawn or to replace several torn screens in the town’s memory. Gincy had been to the apartment only once, and not because she was invited but because one of the other tenants had called the Gannons to say that he was hearing weird noises and smelling strange odors coming from Tommy’s apartment. Gincy and Rick had been paying a flying visit to her parents on their way to Maine for a weekend. and rather than subject the Gannons to whatever unpleasantness they were bound to find at Tommy’s home, they had driven to Birch Lane, fully expecting disaster.

  But what they had found was innocuous enough. After a few minutes of loud knocking, the weird sounds stopped—electronic squeaks and squeals, interspersed with a screaming electric guitar—and Tommy had opened the door, rubbing his eyes and looking mildly puzzled. “Hey,” he said. “Dudes, what are you doing here?” They had explained about the call from the concerned neighbor, at which point Tommy had burst out laughing. “Oh, man, Luke’s so neurotic! He watches way too many cop shows.”

  Rick then asked about the sounds and the smell—more pungent now that the door was open. The sounds had come from a CD put out by a local band. “They do experimental heavy metal stuff,” Tommy had explained. The smell was coming from a batch of incense Tommy’s girlfriend of the moment had made especially for him. “And why didn’t you answer the door right away?” Gincy had demanded. Tommy had just shrugged.

  Tommy had been married once for about a nanosecond. Well, six months, really. That’s how long it had taken his poor wife to realize her mistake and contact a lawyer. He had no kids that he knew of. Gincy remembered his proclaiming that with a hearty laugh, but that had been years ago. Maybe now her brother took the idea of fatherhood more seriously. She wouldn’t know. He was often out of work; Gincy had no idea how he paid his rent. He often couldn’t afford to keep a car and routinely had to bum rides from friends. Back at Ed Gannon’s funeral, he was in possession of a rusty old truck; Gincy suspected it had fallen apart by now.

  But the most frustrating thing about Tommy was his attitude of entitlement and his irresponsibility. Nothing was ever his fault. The world was always against him and had been from the start. Gincy had lost track of the number of times she had heard him say something like, “If only I had some money, everything would be okay. I could really turn things around if only someone would give me a chance.”

  To be fair, Gincy thought, taking a sip of the now cold and muddy coffee, maybe Tommy didn’t feel entitled. Maybe wh
at was behind his view of the world and his place in it was a regrettable ignorance. That or a sense of his own inadequacy, something he could handle only by a big dose of wishful thinking. If that were the case, you could feel sorry for Tommy Gannon.

  The second most frustrating thing about Tommy, at least for his sister, was her mother’s attitude toward him. Ellen Gannon saw her son through rose-colored glasses. Every conversation Gincy had ever had with her mother about Tommy followed pretty much the same script.

  Mrs. Gannon: “Your poor brother has had terrible luck in life.”

  Gincy: “You make your own luck in this world, Mom. He doesn’t even try.”

  Mrs. Gannon: “No woman has ever understood poor Tommy. Look at that woman he married. She was just a cold fish, leaving him like that. Heartless.”

  Gincy: “Mom, Tommy gambled away all of their money—not that there was much of it—within months of the wedding. And then he cheated on her with her best friend.”

  Mrs. Gannon: “You’ve always been too harsh on your little brother, Virginia.”

  Well, Gincy thought now, leaning back in her comfortable chair and remembering how lost or sad Tommy had seemed at Ed Gannon’s funeral, yes, maybe she had been too harsh. But it was hard to place faith in someone who always let you down, even if he couldn’t help but let you down because he didn’t have the courage or the intelligence or the strength to do otherwise. Again, to be fair—something Gincy always tried to be though she failed more often than she would care to admit—her brother hadn’t actually asked her for money since about two years back. But what did that mean, she wondered. That he was making enough money selling drugs or stealing from unattended cash registers to support himself?

  Gincy felt her blood pressure rising. She would definitely wait until she talked to Rick about Tommy’s phone call before getting in touch with Ellen and saying something she would regret. Rick was the rational one in the family. He could calm her down when she got worked up about her mother or her brother. Calming her down when she got worked up about her family—or about anything else—was only one of Rick Luongo’s many, many good points.

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