Because He Wanted It

I'm home. I'm back in Buffalo. ("I wish you wouldn't say that," Josh said. He was on the phone with me as I was crossing over into New York from Massachusetts. "You're misrepresenting yourself, you know. You're not from Buffalo. You're from the country. You grew up in a town an hour from Buffalo. Don't be a liar."

"Don't be a pussy," I said. "I can get to Buffalo in half an hour.")

Two days after I got home, my mother and I decided to spend a day making Christmas cut-outs and our family's (hard! ridiculous! pain-in-the-ass!) fudge recipe. Here's how that went: The oven started on fire and we ruined the fudge.

Later, my brother came home from work in a pissy mood. He's mad at our mother. He's avoiding her and not speaking to her. Why? Well, recently he passed the test he'd failed twice before--the test that allowed him to enroll in an intense one year nursing program his girlfriend had already gotten into--and this made him happy, but that happiness was short lived. Back when he started trying to get into the program, our mother told him that if he did get in, he could stop paying her rent, rent that he has been required to pay for a while now, since after he flunked out of auto mechanic school it seemed possible that he might just freeload off my mother forever. Since she has been collecting rent (forty bucks a week), my mother has been socking it away for Adam so that she can give it to him when he moves out. He doesn't know this. He has no idea that he has several thousand dollars saved up in his name for when he and his girlfriend get an apartment together. Surprise!

So, because he doesn't know this, and because he is under the assumption that my mother is collecting all his hard-earned Ass. Head Cashier money and then throwing fistfuls of it over her head as she rolls around in the rest on her bed, he is pretty angry because he came home and said, "Hey! I passed! Looks like I don't need to pay rent anymore!" and my mother said, "Uh, no. I said when you started the program you won't need to pay me rent anymore. You don't go to school until October." She told him to pony up the dough. He told her she was black and evil inside.

"I mean it!" he said. "You're black and evil for doing this to me, Mother!"

And then he stomped away and hasn't really spoken to her since (unless you count our family dinner on Sunday, when, after we finished our stir-fry, he brought out his recent acquisitions, a book called 400 Sauces and a book called The Encyclopedia of Cooking Ingredients, and gave us all a lecture on the superiority of European lobsters and the importance of a good Bernaise). He's still pissed about his money. He wants that $160. He's got stuff to buy. Important stuff.

Like a robe. A really good robe. A really, really good robe. This was at this top of his to-buy list this past week, and he made a purchase--sad because he didn't have an extra $160 to do it with--that he unveiled at dinner. He was chilly, he said, so he needed to put on a robe. Now, it's important to know that the child has a perfectly fine, perfectly good, perfectly normal robe already, but it's also important to know that this robe, this new robe, spoke to him. It called his name. It whispered in his ear: Adam! Touch me!

And Adam did. And he loved the robe. And he purchased the robe.

The only problem? It's a girl's robe. It's a red, satin-trimmed, fluffy-necked girl robe.

"Nice robe," I said.

"Thanks," he said. He petted it. He rubbed the fluffy neck against his cheek. "It's the best robe ever."

"It's also a girl's robe," I said.

"I don't care," he said.

His girlfriend rolled her eyes to the ceiling.

"You're wearing a girl's robe," I said.

"IT IS COMFORTABLE," he said. "IT'S THE MOST COMFORTABLE ROBE I'VE EVER TOUCHED. OKAY? I WANTED IT!"

"Okay," I said. "Fine."

And then he reached for some more duck sauce and another egg roll.