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