My big brother was my hero and I would do anything for him.
For his thirtieth birthday my mom planned a big party at the house. She got his favourite West Indian restaurant in Scarborough to cater it, and when I arrived at the house, my dad was leaving to pick up the huge foil trays of curry chicken, rice and peas, macaroni pie and vegetable stir-fry. He waved at me as he pulled out the driveway, where my mom was standing with an annoyed look on her face. She motioned for me to pull up in the driveway instead of parking on the street.
“Do you mind going to pick up the roti skins from Sister Grant?” I looked at the digital clock on my dashboard; it was a few minutes to six. “Your father’s so lazy,” she continued. “I asked him to pick them up this morning and he dilly-dally and tee-tee-vay and now he don’t have time to pick up both the food and the roti.”
Sister Grant was an elderly lady at church that my mom treated like a mother. She made the best fresh roti, but she lived in the west end, off of Eglinton West past the subway station, past Randy’s Patties and past the No Frills supermarket. I managed to get back by seven by driving dangerously fast on the unnecessarily traffic-riddled highway.
As I put down the thick round stack of rotis wrapped in foil and collapsed deep into my parents’ 20-year-old couch, the doorbell rang—or rather, it crackled. I got up and looked out the peephole and saw Sasha’s unforgettably perfect breasts, shoulders, neck and face. Her hugs and kisses still gave me the same feeling they did ten years before, and I sometimes wondered if I couldn’t make any of my relationships last because it was her I really wanted.
Her cousin, her best friend and her best friend’s sister that she’d been promising to hook me up with since the first day I met her followed in line behind her. Ramon’s two long-time best friends were already there. They floated upstairs from my brother’s old room along with two cousins from Scarborough that we grew up with and one cousin from Brooklyn that had driven up just for the occasion. One by one they gave me pounds and hugs.
The older of my two cousins from Scarborough, the one that was closer to Ramon in age asked me, “Have you talked to your brother today?”
I hadn’t. Anyone that knew Ramon knew that he was reliably late. You could always count on him for that. He didn’t even make it to either of my twenty-fifth birthday parties earlier in the year—the tame little dinner at my parents’ house or the basement jam at my cousin’s townhouse. People were upset that he wasn’t there but I wasn’t even offended, I was so used to his unpredictability. I took any promise from my brother with a huge white, blue and red bag of Sifto salt, and never held him to it.
But this was his thirtieth birthday.
More and more people were rolling in ahead of him as if it were a surprise party. My mom had told him to be there for five o’clock in the hopes that he’d show up some time after seven, but by the time those of us who were accustomed to his shenanigans noticed that he was later than usual it was going on nine.
The phone rang.
“Ricky, can you get that? The portable phone’s on my bed,” Mom yelled. I jogged upstairs to grab it before the person hung up. It wasn’t Ramon, but I’d seen the number on the caller ID screen somewhere before.
“Hello?”
“Good evening, this is Police Constable Jonathon Wilson from 42 Division. Is this the home of Ramon …” My heart dropped. I wrote down everything he said like a robot, but I didn’t really hear it or process it.
I floated absentmindedly down the stairs with the phone in one hand and the paper I’d written on in the other.
“I should have known he was no good when his little brother snuck me down to his bedroom the first time I ever came over here,” I heard Sasha tell her friend and her cousin.
“It’s just disappointing that everything is a priority for Ramon except his family,” I heard my mom say to my aunt and uncle.
“Son, if you open the casket at this nigga’s funeral, I bet he won’t be in there,” I heard my cousin from Brooklyn say while my other cousins and Ramon’s two homeboys died with laughter.
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About The Author
Jeff Roulston, also known as Jeff The Writer, is a social service worker, coach and proud Torontonian. He is a graduate of Oakwood University, an Historically-Black College, where he studied communications, played varsity basketball and edited the Spreading Oak newspaper. His poetry, short stories, essays and articles have appeared in The Huntsville (Ala.) Times, Urbanology, HipHopCanada.com, Sway, OmitLimitation.com, BKNation.org and F-You: The Forgiveness Project’s anthology Memoirs of Violence and Compassion.
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Other Books By Jeff Roulston
Toronto The Good. Poetry Chapbook, published September 2013
Second Chances And Other Short Stories. E-book, published February 2014
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Connect With Jeff
…On the web: https://www.jeffroulston.com/
…by e-mail: [email protected]
…on Twitter: @JeffRoulston
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There Goes The Neighbourhood And Other Short Stories Page 2