My brother Joe, eyes glossing over with tears and mouth hanging open, stood in front the freezer
case that contained ice cream and other frozen treats. “How much money did mom give us?” he asked
me, never taking his eyes off the half-gallon sized tubs of happiness that sat before him.
“Only ten dollars,” I replied, knowing what he was thinking. “Look, Joe. Mom wanted us to get
her a loaf of bread, a can of tomato sauce, some ground beef, and a pack of cigarettes. I don’t even
know if the ten dollars she gave us is going to cover that . I might have to put some of my own money in
there. We can’t afford ice cream or anything else that mom didn’t intend for us to get.”
“How much money do you have, Sebastian?”
“No, goddamit! I say no to you. Just because you’re a few years older than me doesn’t mean
you can use my hard-earned money to fill that fat belly of yours to even larger proportions.”
“Hard earned? You stole that money from Grandma when she fell asleep on the back porch last
week. I deserve that money just as much as you do. And besides, the ice cream isn’t for me, you
assumptive little gnome. It’s for mother.”
“Sure it is, Joe. And, no, you don’t deserve the money as much as I do.”
“How much, Sebastian?”
“Thirty bucks.”
“C’mon, just give me five of it. I’ll pay it back to you. I promise.”
I handed over a ten dollar bill to my brother (I had no five dollar bill to give him) and watched him
add it to the wadded-up ball of ones our mother gave us this morning. I still wonder to this day why he
didn’t give me five of those ones (to complete the transaction, so to speak.)
Our mother is sort of a hermit. She isn’t too fat to get out of the house and she isn’t paralyzed or
anything, she just doesn’t like going outside. She’s been like that ever since we were born. Our father
used to do the errands after he got off work so that she could stay home and be a good mother to Joe
and I, but he died three years ago. It was a tragic mixture of too much whisky and going too fast through
a residential area. Thank God no one else was hurt. Joe was fifteen and I was twelve.
Joe had always been kind of a hefty kid. He didn’t used to be fat like he is now, but he always
had a few extra pounds where they didn’t belong (all derived from a weakness for television and fried
food, I suppose). It was after dad’s death that he began to really eat obsessively. I remember that after
dad died, Joe was the one that spent his time trying to console our mother. Since she never left the
house, Joe never left the house.
Mother rarely left her room for that first year. She would sit in there and cry until her voice gave
out and she succumbed to the mental exhaustion and finally slept for a few hours. Joe would sit outside
of her room, in a chair reading a comic book or just sitting there, staring at the wall. He would sit there
until he heard her take a break from crying so that he could go in there and tend to her. He would ask
her if she needed anything to eat or drink or if she wanted to talk about anything at all. Mostly, she
would ask him to go buy her a pack of cigarettes or to go check the mail. Joe was never the one to go get
the things that mother needed, however. He was just the messenger. I was the errand boy who was
always sent down to the Stop & Go on my bike to get what she needed while Joe stayed at home with
mother, not letting her out of his sight until I returned home.
The owner of the convenient store knew us and knew our mother, so he really didn’t hassle me
when I tried to buy cigarettes. I really wanted to help out with mom’s mental state, but I had my own
mental state to take care of. Getting her the things she needed with the money the government handed
down to us with pity was the only consolation that I could give to her. It was the only thing that kept my
conscience from falling over the edge into oblivion.
It was around that time that I began to notice things about my brother. Of the various things that
I brought home at our mother’s request from the grocery store (milk, eggs, butter, two whole chickens,
nearly six pounds of ground beef, lunch meat, fudge-covered Oreos, two heads of lettuce, one loaf of
white bread, one loaf of wheat bread, a jar of peanuts, cereal, bananas, pancake mix, oregano, pretzels,
twenty-four slices of American cheese, and a newspaper), Joe would set aside half of the provisions for
himself. He would then hide them in his room, more precisely in a series of ventilated shoe boxes at the
top of his closet. The items that required refrigeration stayed in the refrigerator, in the crisper, in a brown
paper shopping bag. All of these precautions were completely unneeded, however, because our mother
did not leave her room, and even if she did, she would not dare open the refrigerator or go in either of
our rooms. Anything she wanted she asked us to get for her.
Joe has gained at least one hundred pounds in the past three years. He has no interest in trying
to impress the card-carrying members of the opposite sex. He does not take into consideration the
possibility of heart disease. Joe does not have a job that requires strenuous activity or any act of manual
labor. In fact, Joe has no job at all. He lives off the brevity of federal assistance intended for our mother,
allotting money only for bills and food.
Joe’s life is a practice of both devotion and indulgence. He cares for our mother more than he
cares for himself or for me. His best friend is his mom and his happiness lies within her tranquility. I’ve
complained on various occasions of our mother’s laziness and apathy.
“I wish mother would go get her own damn groceries,” I would say. “She has a car. I have a
bike. It is nearly one hundred degrees outside and Mrs. Bickle’s dog is out of its backyard again.”
“Shut the hell up, Sebastian,” my brother would say in a calm but deliberate manner. “That
mother of ours has been through unimaginable stress and horror. Once you have lost your spouse and
in turn lost your only respectable lifeline of income and stability, then you can complain about having to
go buy the goddam groceries.” I can still see the sweat rolling down his forehead into his eyes and his
large torso heaving under the divine light of the overhead fixture that hangs omnipotently over our living
room.
But as much as my dear brother cared for our mother, he always had to get his cut of the culinary
benefits. He would tend to my mother for hours, doing her laundry, cleaning her house and making her
dinner. He would toil for her into the night. Before he would go to bed, however, he would succumb to
the chocolate demons and sugar-coated sins that called for him from the top of his closet and from his
“feed bag” in the refrigerator. For thirty minutes he would sit in his room with the door closed with those
things. He would exit his room in the morning without a trace of his late night activities. I knew what he
was doing, though. I could hear the sound of bags of potato chips opening.
“Mom is going to love this ice cream, Sebastian.”
After all of these years, he still thinks that I don’t know of his clandestine operation.
He made the cashier place the ice cream in many layers of plastic followed by a final layer of
paper. “I don’t want my mother’s ice cream to melt before we get it to her,” he said. The cashier looked
at him with an artificial look of agreement and understanding and told us to enjoy the rest of our sunny
summer day. What a joke.
As we were leaving, though, a strange thing happened. Outside of the supermarket was a
homeless man, sitting without a chair and without comfort, on the hard, cement ground. As each
satisfied customer exited the store, he would hold his hand out and ask for spare change. It seemed
more like he was asking for forgiveness than anything. Joe saw this man and reached into the shopping
bag containing our mother’s groceries. He pulled out the can of cheap tomato sauce and placed it in the
man’s hand. The bum looked up into Joe’s bulging eyes in a confused manner and said “God Bless.” It
seemed more like a question than a statement.
I still to this day cannot figure out why Joe gave him what he did, or why he gave him anything at
all. The man would have been better off with the ground beef or with the loaf of bread. But Joe gave him
a can of cheap, condensed tomato sauce. We never saw that homeless man again.
I remember now, looking back, the car ride home after our afternoon together. Joe was smoking
one of mom’s cigarettes and breathing heavily. He kept looking in the backseat to make sure the ice
cream wasn’t melting. I don’t see why he was worried. We lived but a mere six minutes away. As we
were on our journey home, however, I recall Joe taking a long drag off of the cigarette and saying, “I
hope mom appreciates this ice cream, since it came out of our own personal money and all. I just want
her to be happy, ya know? Ya know, Sebastian?”
I said nothing to him. And I’m sure that if you asked our mother right now if her two young boys
ever bought her some ice cream, she would look at you cross-eyed and say, “I haven’t the faintest clue
what you are talking about. I avoid such fatty foods.”
© 2000 by Andrew Morgan