The first time I understood what I was in my family, I was seventeen years old and I had just gotten a ninety-four on a chemistry exam.
I came home with the paper and my mother was on the phone with her sister and my father was watching something in the other room and I stood in the kitchen for a moment with the paper in my hand and then I put it on the refrigerator with a magnet and made myself a sandwich and went to my room. Nobody asked about it. Nobody noticed it on the refrigerator. By the following week it had been covered by a grocery list and a coupon for detergent.
I am thirty years old now and I have thought about that paper many times since, not because the exam was important but because the pattern it established was, and because the pattern was invisible to me for a long time in the way that patterns are invisible when you are inside them.
My name is Owen. I work in tech, which is a shorthand that covers a specific job that I am good at and that pays well, and which I will not specify beyond that because the specifics are not the point. The point is that I make enough money to have been useful to my family in the way that people in my family become useful when they make enough money, which is to say they become the solution to other people’s problems rather than a person with their own.
My brother Aiden is twenty-five. He has my father’s ease and my mother’s talent for making you feel responsible for their emotions, and he has always found a way to be present in the family’s good moments and absent from its difficult ones. I do not say this with hatred. I say it as an accurate description of how Aiden operates, which I had spent twenty-five years making allowances for before the Christmas when I stopped.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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