The Wrong Family(9)

      5


WINNIE

“Hold on.” Nigel was forcing himself to stay calm. She heard him switch the phone from one ear to the other. When he came back on, his voice sounded strained. “Did you say your brother is staying with us?”

As Winnie launched into a quick recap of Dakota’s latest scheme, her stomach sank lower. She watched as Carmen stepped off the elevator, a white paper bag clutched under her arm. She raised a hand as she passed Winnie’s desk, but Winnie didn’t give her the cursory smile she normally did.

“He took his paycheck to the racetrack and bet it all on a trifecta. Manda kicked him out.”

“As she should,” Nigel said. “But Dakota needs to—”

“It’s just for a bit,” Winnie said cautiously, and then into the receiver she hissed, “Shelly took him in last time, it’s technically our turn.”

Winnie was glad her husband couldn’t see her face; she could see it in the reflection of her computer monitor and it was pale and afraid. Shelly was the oldest of the Straub sisters. Nigel hated her—had from the moment her eyes had met his and she’d said, “My sister didn’t do a very good job of describing you.” He’d assumed she’d meant it as an insult since she’d ended her statement with a little laugh and then looked away like he wasn’t important. That had been his account of it anyway. Shelly never made much of their first meeting, which Winnie supposed was like her sister. She was rarely impressed, and if she was, it had something to do with money.

Despite Shelly’s poorly hidden disdain for her sister’s husband, Winnie deferred to everything Shelly said—all the siblings did. After their father died, their mother seemed to forget how to parent beyond smothering them in weepy affection. It was Shelly who had raised her siblings, making them dinner, getting them to bed, and occasionally forging their mother’s signature on school forms. If Shelly told Winnie it was her turn to take Dakota, Winnie would accept her lot without complaint; he was her twin, after all, though sharing a womb together didn’t make living with him easier. Nigel, on the other hand, wanted to complain, she knew that. In fact, he wanted to speak to the manager, but the manager was a five-foot general who wore practical chinos, a sharp bob, and didn’t give a shit about what Nigel or Winnie thought. Shelly, the oldest, lord of the Straubs.

Winnie pulled in a deep breath, ready with her list of defenses and justifications. Hadn’t she put up with his mother for years? The mother of an only child can be clingy, especially when she was still single and relied on said only child for practically everything. She’d prepared a list of all the times that dealing with his mother had been hard for her—pathetic, she knew, but the guilt angle was all she had to work with.

“Do you really think that’s a good idea with Samuel in the house? He was really upset last time Dakota stayed with us.”

Her heart sank. The Samuel angle knocked every justification out of her mouth.

Two years ago, Manda had kicked her husband out for sexting with a coworker. When she confronted him, Dakota had thrown every dish they had onto the kitchen floor in a rage, then proceeded to slip and cut himself on a piece of dinner plate. He’d blamed Manda for his fall, saying she’d upset him, and then schlepped off to the hospital to get four stitches in his forearm. He’d ended up at Shelly’s that time. Winnie distinctly remembered her saying “So what, right? He didn’t even have sex with her...” And Shelly had moved their beloved brother into the spare room.

“Yeah, but Shelly, if Mike did that—” Winnie had protested.

“Ha! He knows better. And besides,” she’d said out of the corner of her mouth, “Manda has really let herself go.”

The next time Manda kicked him out it was for a tiny pouch of white powder she found in his wallet. They’d taken him that time—her and Nigel. It had been Chelsea’s turn, technically, but she was in Hawaii for her tenth wedding anniversary with her wife, Mary. Dakota had hidden in the spare room for a week, and then one night, he’d gotten high and drunk while Winnie was cooking dinner and had stumbled into the living room wearing only his tighty-whiteys while Samuel was watching TV. As Samuel watched wide-eyed from the sofa, his uncle threw up on the PlayStation and then shat himself.

Manda had always fought with him for—wait for it—drinking too much in front of their kids and acting erratic. Instead, he came to drink in front of Winnie’s kid, which of course had caused a fight with Nigel of epic proportions.

Winnie paused for a long moment, and then she swore. “Shit. Dammit. How could I forget about that? I can have Samuel stay with my mom for the weekend. We’ll reassess on Sunday.” All the sisters were the same way about Dakota—they babied him. Except he wasn’t a baby, and Winnie had a sinking feeling that this time Manda wasn’t going to forgive him.

“Maybe Dakota and Manda will work things out by then, anyway—they usually do,” she said. She stared at her screen saver: a photo of her and Nigel and Samuel standing on a beach during their vacation to the Dominican Republic last year.

“It’s never been this bad before. Manda might not be so willing to take him back this time. He’s been a college kid on a bender for the last ten years, Winnie.”

She sighed deeply. Dakota’s emotional outbursts as a child were frequent; Winnie remembered him as being sulky and demanding. Their father’s death seemed to tip him over the edge; he navigated through his grief with fists and one suicide attempt when he was seventeen. But he’d always been angry; at what Winnie didn’t know. He seemed to pick and choose his triggers. At their joint tenth birthday party, Dakota was so furious that he had to share a party with her that he’d picked up the sheet cake that their mother had paid three hundred dollars for and dumped it into the pool. Winnie could still picture him standing in his camo swim trunks with the neon orange trim, the cake a large sheet with a photo of their faces airbrushed across the top. He made eye contact with her the second before he launched their smiling faces into the deep end. He hadn’t been punished, of course; their parents had laughed it off to their friends.