Anthony Neil Smith

Strays

The second was Benny, her oldest brother. Surprised her with a call, middle of the afternoon.

“She tried to put me away, told Anita to beat it. Got a restraining order against her, can you believe it?”

Lyn stopped rocking in her chair on the back patio with her two stray cats perched on either side. This was her smoking spot now that her husband had banned it from the house. “Who did what? Restraining what?”

“I’m at the police station. Um, uh, where, I don’t…excuse me, where are we again? Right, right. Tuscaloosa. I made it as far as Tuscaloosa.”

Lyn fished the details. Benny’s own daughter, Farrah, the rich dentist in Tennessee, had gotten the restraining order against her dad’s ex-wife/current girlfriend/drinking buddy on the ground of his diminished capacity. “The doctors, they don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s bullshit. I’m fine.” Then she’d found an assisted-living complex for memory patients, an expensive one. “And it’s my money she’s using! Not her own, of course not. She’s going to bleed me dry.” After a couple weeks, he got in his Mercedes, and starting driving South without a plan, really. One quick BOLO for the car later, he’s pulled over and taken in.

“Can’t you tell them, or tell Farrah, please, tell them I’m on my way to see you?”

So that’s what Lyn did. She told the deputies he was welcome to drive on down, and then called Farrah to let her know. Couldn’t believe the girl had done this to her own father, but Lyn wasn’t looking to fight. Just looking to calm things down.

“He can stay here as long as he wants, it won’t be a problem. Until we can get him to another doctor, a second opinion.”

Farrah gave her blessing. The nieces and nephews loved Aunt Lyn most of all, the cool aunt. She was good at handling family affairs, same as she’d done for years with her own mother before she passed at ninety-three. Only the two youngest of the six stayed around to take care of Mom, the house, and her finances. Lyn was trusted, never a doubt, even by Benny, the self-made multimillionaire, self-made asshole who’d tried and failed to take hold of the reins over the years, his mother’s will too strong right up until the end.

He showed up the next day. Benny preferred “Ben” or “Benjamin” but among the six, he was Benny, end of story. He was the third oldest, seventy-seven, and Lyn hadn’t seen him in a couple of years. He’d shrunk, weak shouldered, favoring his right like he’d had a stroke – maybe he had? – in a golf shirt and shorts, and still wearing his goddamned sandy-blond beach bum toupee everyone knew was a rug.

“Hey, baby girl.” Still calling his sixty-eight year old sister ‘baby girl.’ He gave her a hug, definitely favoring his right side, she could tell now.

“What a week.”

Then a look around her neighborhood.

“Lot of brothas live here, don’t they?”

Of course he’d say that.

CC had been first, the youngest, and the one who’d never left home. Benny had wanted him out so they could sell Mom’s house and split the money.

Lyn had said, “What money?” It was a small house, nearly busting the seams at family Christmases, in a neighborhood built in the fifties, still scarred from Katrina sixteen years on.

When Mom finally died after several years of hinting at it – “Oh Lord, I’m ready when you are” – Lyn did her thing. She smoothed sore emotions and convinced the others to let CC have the house. He’d been the one taking care of it all these years – mowing, painting, cleaning. He’d earned it.

Until it was obvious he really hadn’t. Repairs never finished, appliances never replaced, Mom’s room left to gather dust as-is, and “friends” taking advantage – and by “friends” Lyn knew he meant men, homosexual men. They’d known CC was gay, but he’d kept that part of his life walled away from his parents, away from the family. It wasn’t obvious. He wasn’t femme, liked sports and heavy metal and trucks, like all his friends. Lyn figured when Mom passed away, he’d “come out” to them all.

He didn’t.

Warning signs – some bruises, some black eyes, another job lost, no explanations.

It took Lyn driving down and cleaning out the vermin – literal and etc. Scared the living shit out of men three times bigger and three times younger. She told CC he could stay with her until the house was fixed up, and she helped him get a new job at the clinic in Slidell. It was good for him, she’d told her husband, Jonesy.

He wasn’t thrilled, but hey, if it made his wife happy and kept CC out of trouble, no harm done.

Lyn and Jonesy’s house had four bedrooms – the master, plus Lyn’s youngest daughter’s old room before she married and moved out, then back in for over a year after Katrina, then out again a few blocks away, plus the “music room” filled with Jonesy’s guitars and amps. When he wasn’t directing funerals, you’d find him in the French Quarter a few nights a week playing rhythm behind a singer/sax player who gave the tourists exactly what they wanted – Dixieland classics. He’s let his hair go long and grew a jazz beard.

The last room was CC’s. He wasn’t there when Benny arrived, thank god, because Lyn didn’t want to watch Big Brother lecture Little Brother on all his missteps again, and watch CC try to fight back but end up humiliated, Jesus.

“Good to see you, baby girl. Lots of ethnics in this neighborhood.”

Repeating himself. He’d say it a few more times before bedtime. Lyn hadn’t believed it when Farrah told her Benny was blanking out, forgetting where he was, asking the same questions over and over. The only thing he was solid on, she’d said, was his money. Every dime, every bill, every credit card, every account, solid.

It didn’t run in the family, dementia. Their dad had been sharp as a tack until the end, and Mom’s memory dulled very little the last few painful years. The oldest girls hadn’t shown any signs – they’d lost Colette to cancer a couple of years prior, and Bette was still going strong at eighty.

Well, okay. Bette will be the third. Later.

Benny’s routine was to come downstairs, cook himself some bacon no matter how much he got in everyone’s way, then sit out back with Lyn and scold her for smoking too much.. His fucking toupee was never on straight anymore.

When she needed to go to the store, Benny would come along and pay for everything. The price was having to listen to him bitch about her driving constantly.

“Pass this fool, would you? Why are you sitting on his ass like…now slow down. Leadfoot over here. Calm down. This ain’t Daytona” and on and on.

He doted on his grand-nieces, Lyn’s only grandkids, and bought them sno-balls and candy. Since her oldest son, Fry, and his wife had decided not to have any kids, and her middle daughter, Helena, was in her forties and unlucky in love, Rochelle’s two girls were all Lyn had.

Benny asked Jonesy about ten times a day if they could go play golf. Goddamn, Benny missed golf.

Jonesy always held his lips in a tight grin, close to cracking. “I don’t play anymore. Lost my clubs in Katrina.”

“You don’t need clubs. Use my clubs. We can rent you some clubs. I can give you some tips. Goddamn, I miss golf. Can’t remember the last time…”

And to CC, “Never going to make it on your own unless you’re on your own. You need a chance to fail. This job of yours? It’s no career. That won’t get you where you need to go. Let me make a few calls, I’m sure the CEO will still listen to the company founder.”

CC stayed in his room a lot more.

Then after dinner, Benny would declare, “I want to watch a movie. Baby girl, find us a movie. Jonesy? Jonesy, want to watch a movie with us?”

Jonesy found an extra gig in the French Quarter. Four nights a week now.

But what was Lyn supposed to do, huh? Let her brother waste away in an old folks’ home, his money sucked into a vortex? It wasn’t dignified. It wasn’t right.

Besides, he wasn’t staying there forever. She’d get Benny set up with a new doctor, get him back to his old self, and find him a better place to live. Someplace he could golf again.

Jonesy would come around. He knew what he was getting marrying into her crazy family. A woman several years older with three adult kids?  An extended family of loudmouth Beverly Hillbillies? He knew damned good and well.

Yes, Bette was third.

Bette’s daughter called Lyn. “They found her passed out in her bathroom. Fell off the toilet. They got to her just in time. Heart attack.”

Luckily, it wasn’t fatal. They popped in two stents and let her rest a few days before releasing her.

And of course, it was Lyn there to meet her in Baton Rouge. She hadn’t even told Jonesy.

It shouldn’t have been Lyn. Bette had two kids, plus her ex-husband who kept hanging around even though they knew it would never work. She had friends. She had co-workers – yes, still working at eighty.

But Bette’s daughter had screeched, “I can’t! I can’t even! With my work? With my family? We don’t have room! She’d drive me up the wall! I can’t do it.”

And Lyn didn’t trust some of the others would look after her full time. So…

She heard her older sister before she saw her, as was usual. A loud, twangy, elastic voice always on the verge of laryngitis, it seemed. A male nurse rolled her out, probably because a woman would have murdered her by then.

“Big strapping young man! You make me feel special. I’m sure you’ve got some young pretty things getting their panties wet for you, but if you ever want an older lover. Oh, look, there’s my sister! My sister’s come to get me. Look at how young and thin she is, while I’m old and fat.”

Bette’s hair, as always, was black as black could be, and would stay so as long as Clairol made that shade. She got out of the chair and demanded a hug from the nurse, who kept the chair between them and skittered away, something about “against policy.”

“A damn lie. Forgive me Jesus. Look at you, Lyn! The Lord let me live, he let me live, Lynelle, can you believe it? I must be doing something right. Is this your Cherokee? It’s fancy, real fancy. Can we get a po-boy?”

And then some.

Lyn forced herself to stay up past one in the morning and wait for Jonesy to come home from a gig. She smoked and watched the raccoons crawl over the fence from the woods looking for scraps. Lyn had nailed a few Mardi Gras cups to the back and filled them with leftover bits of dinner. Ribs, shrimp, half-eaten corn cobs

Good thing she’d taken the peacock to a rescue or the raccoons might’ve feasted on it. The weirdest thing, this peacock showing up in her yard last November. Just gorgeous, the deepest blue and electric green, all those “eyes” on his tail. She didn’t have a clue where it had come from, and she didn’t want it to starve. She Googled what to feed it, went to Walmart for food, then set a bowl of bird seed out past the patio. Soon the peacock was coming right up to her, unafraid, happy to see her.

Lyn would’ve kept it forever if Jonesy hadn’t told her it was a bad idea and called the rescue. She really missed the beautiful bird.

The Ring doorbell chimes alerted her to Jonesy coming in. She pictured him, setting down the guitar case, seeing the patio light on and knowing she was there, and walking past the queen-sized blow-up mattress in the living room.

He stepped out onto the patio, holding his suit coat in his hands. Regardless of the heat down in the Quarter, he wanted to look the part. Suspenders, pin-stripes, pork pie hat. But he was soaked through and saturated with the odors of the club – beer, piss, hot garbage, sweat, and frying grease. He sat in the chair beside her, smoke curling into his face, and kept his eyes to the patio slab.

“She can’t climb the stairs. I had to give her our bed.”

A sigh.

“Well, Kelly wasn’t going to take her. What was I supposed to do?”

“I know it. Believe me, I know it. Doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.”

“You’d better very well get happy, because you’re not going to punish me going round depressed. It’s only for a little while.”

Jonesy clapped his hands on his knees. “You said the same damned thing about CC!”

“And he’ll be staying three nights a week anymore instead of seven!”

Almost laughable. She heard it, but wouldn’t dare break. Something her mom used to do – laugh when she got real mad at you. Now that definitely runs in the family.

Lyn slumped back into her chair. “You’d better not be thinking of, uh, like, laying down some ultra-mat-ee-um, or some such. This ain’t about us. They’re getting old.”

“So are we.”

“Not like them.”

A grin. No, a fake-ass grin. “Yes, dear.”

Jonesy got up, opened the door to the kitchen, and got a little tripped up by both cats wanting out. “A few more strays won’t hurt nothing, I guess.”

Myron called the next day.

“Surprise. I’m in town.”

Number four.

Lyn was adding birdseed to a couple of new bird houses. The big seeds parrots like, hoping she could attract any that might’ve flown away from their homes. Nearly dropped the phone.

“You’re in town?”

“Can I drop by?”

“Shit, the more the merrier, I suppose. How long will you be here?”

“I’ll be over in ten minutes. We’ll talk.”

Myron was in-between Lyn and Benny in the order. Where Benny had become the insufferable millionaire, Myron ended up more of a drifter. A romantic. Married four times, divorced four times, with long strings of heartbreak in-between. He never lasted more than a year or two at any job, he was so restless. Texas, Tennessee, even California, Lyn had lost track.

He parked beside Benny’s Mercedes in a Pontiac Grand Prix faded from red to almost pink, blistered by whatever desert he’d driven through to get here. He could care less about how his hair looked, what was left of it, and he shuffled in sandals, Lyn imagining him as Jesus for a moment.

“You have no idea, do you?” She hugged his neck. “Not a clue.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s like a family reunion.”

She led him inside past the dining room, really just storage for books no one had read and the queen-sized blow-up bed, to the living room, where Bette sat at the upright piano, playing and singing the only song she knew all the way through. “Sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset…” Benny was in the kitchen, cooking more bacon. CC loomed over Jonesy – who was enjoying a day off, plucking a guitar on the couch – talking about an AC/DC cover band he’d seen called “CD/BD.”

“Look who the cat drug in!”

Benny and Myron hadn’t gotten along for years, but it looked like all was forgiven. Looked that way. It wasn’t long before the older harped on the younger about getting a job, keeping a woman, with Bette tossing in bombs like, “You already divorced the best you’ll ever have. They keep getting worse and worse.”

Then Myron told them he might need a place to stay, at least until he could save up enough and move to Vietnam – a place he’d dodged during the war – because he met a girl online who wants to marry him, if he could pay for the permits and paperwork first. Thousands.

“Dirt cheap living over there.”

Lyn wanted to tell him, It’s a scam!

Wanted to tell Benny, Of course there’s a lot of black people here. It’s New Orleans! And it’s fine!

Wanted to tell CC, Grow up!

Wanted to tell Bette, Make your children take care of you!

But she never would. 

Instead, she started for the patio. “Back in a minute.”

She lit up as soon as her feet felt the heat of the concrete, keeping an eye peeled for raccoons, parrots, peacocks, aardvarks, lizards, whatever. Her cats brushed a coat’s worth of hair onto her jeans before taking their perches on either side of her chair.

Looked like someone left a book in her chair. She recognized the cover, an old one from when they took in Helena’s Shih Tzu puppy when he wasn’t allowed in her new apartment. But someone – Jonesy, had to be – was having a little fun with her. They’d cut out some paper to cover the word Shih Tzu and Sharpied in another. The new title was The Care and Feeding of Your Siblings.

Lyn picked it up, hummed a groan and dropped it to the ground. It was funny, she had to admit to herself, but never to Jonesy. She sat and puffed and wondered where in the hell Myron was going to sleep tonight.

All it would take: a trip out to WalMart for another blow-up bed, some cheap food, an old blanket, a collar and water dish, and he’d be fine.

Anthony Neil Smith is a novelist (Slow Bear, The Drummer, Yellow Medicine, many more), short story writer (HAD, Reckon Review, Barcelona Review, Cowboy Jamboree, Maudlin House, Bellevue Literary Review, Exquisite Corpse, many more), professor (Southwest Minnesota State University), Mexican food enthusiast, cheap wine lover, and admirer of Italian exploitation films. One of his pieces was chosen for Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023. He was previously an associate editor with Mississippi Review Web, and is now editor of Revolution John.