| I miss Andrew a lot. More than my real brother, who is starting high school this fall. My baby brother, turning 15. In April, he will be getting his learner's permit. I remember when my mom told me that she was going to have a baby. I was 5, and she was sitting on the edge of the bathtub for some reason. She didn't precede it with any sort of speech like they do on tv shows, she just said "you're going to have a brother." For a minute, I didn't quite get it. Almost six years as an only child and I was quite used to being the most important thing in my parents life. And after a few minutes of me standing there, staring at my mother, it hit me. Oh fuck. I probably would have said it, if I had known the word then. Still, I pretended to be excited to be getting a sibling. While my mother's stomach swelled with the weight of the bastard (not technically) that grew inside it, she began making me a quilt, leaving the pieces spread out on the livingroom floor each day. This was before we had the addition put onto our house, and I would sit on the floor next to her while I watched Sesame Street. I tried making a quilt for my brother with extra scraps of fabric, and when he was born, they put it over him in his bassinet. The night my brother was born, my Grammie Gladys babysat me, and I stayed up in bed as long as I could, using one of those fireman flashlights they have at gas stations. At the end, I was just shining it in my eyes to try and stay awake, but in the morning I woke up next to it, the bulb burnt out. My dad came to tell me I had a brother, and that we were going to the Woodstock Inn for breakfast. Too excited to see him, I passed up breakfast and we went straight to the hospital. And there he was, fat and ugly with lots of black hair, looking red and wrinkled and not quite baked. I wasn't impressed and wished I'd gotten breakfast. We stayed at the hospital all day, and I only remember that when we brought him home that night, I was so hungry. But my brother was crying and soiling his first diaper and there was a big to do, so I ate a granny smith apple from the dining room table, and went upstairs where I slept with my quilt that wasn't quite finished yet. |
