The End of the World as We Know It by Robert Goolrick Read Free Book Online Page A

word
sully
in conversation.
    It turned out his future wife was listening to all this, and she had somehow conceived the notion that I was being unbearably cruel to my brother, and I actually think he had won her heart by telling her all the heartbreaking stories of the various cruelties he had suffered at our hands, his own family—the neglect, the slights, the missing the Little League games because they all came at cocktail hour when nobody was allowed to do anything—my darling, unique brother whom I adored, as I have said, but who really did need to do something with his life. And who actually did go to journalism school, where he wrote his graduate thesis on a punk rock music club, and go on to be a brilliant young journalist in Atlanta, which is where he was when his head blew up.
    But she had heard the conversation and her mind was made up. She hated me. It didn’t seem likely to change, tragedy or not.
    He lay there so helpless and quiet and afraid and every part of his body was soft. His upper arms were unbearably white. His wife was getting massive amounts of attention and he seemed so alone, so unattended, although he wasn’t; it’s just that when you’re so close to death, there’s no amount of attention that’s going to assuage the calamity, at least no amount or kind a normal person could give.
    I slept in the guest room in their townhouse apartment thing, whatever those things are, and I drove his car back and forth to the hospital all the time. It was a nifty little convertible, an Alfa Romeo or something, and I loved that car. His wife slept on acot in the hospital, surrounded by Methodists, and she wept a lot, which is understandable. The hard part was trying to give any real comfort to somebody who so clearly despised me.
    The ten days passed in a languid agony. I shopped for food. I did the laundry. I took my brother’s wife into the chapel and read poetry to her. She only wanted to hear poems about death. She said that, if he died, she would wait to have the baby and then kill herself. She was very young, not even thirty.
    My parents flew down to Atlanta for the operation, these people who never went anywhere, except to Nags Head for three weeks every summer. My sister and her husband came down, leaving my five-year-old niece at home with their friends Teddy and his wife. My sister and her husband stayed with Judy Judy and her husband, but still it was pretty tight quarters in the townhouse with my mother and father since nobody wanted to sleep in my brother’s bed, and so I ended up on the sofa again.
    I made dinner for everybody, a cold tenderloin of beef. It was Memorial Day weekend. I asked my sister-in-law’s best friend whether the piece of meat was big enough.
    â€œHow much did you pay for it?” she asked.
    â€œThirty-five dollars.”
    â€œThat’s enough.”
    My parents were out of their element, and very afraid, and they seemed frail. They were very brave, I thought. Brave, and they were besotted with my brother, even after he wrecked his brand-new car in Germany and took it to the repair shop to have the axle replaced and never went back to pick it up so my father had to buy a car he never saw because he had cosigned forit or something. It was just the abstract of an automobile somewhere in Kaiserslautern, Germany.
    They adored him enough to leave home. Even when my sister was broke and alone with a two-year-old baby and she got tularemia from Bubba, her rabbit, that summer everybody got Legionnaires’ Disease, they wouldn’t go up to Martha’s Vineyard to see her.
    They brought along their own bourbon, in their Samsonite suitcases, as though, in all of Atlanta, you couldn’t buy an inexpensive but drinkable bottle of bourbon. They did that all the time. They took bourbon to the beach. They brought their own bourbon to London, when they came to visit me there, although that made a lot more sense. My mother in her