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"You will do it or your dad will hear about it when he comes home from work tonight...do you understand what I'm trying to say?" She asked us.
"Love ya..." Jerry told me hurriedly as if it would be less painful to get it over with quickly.
"Yeah, yeah...me too." I answered with a wave of nausea.
Mother made us say those unspeakable words to one another for a solid week. I would use the excuses I wasn't hungry, I was running late, I didn't feel well...anything to keep me from sitting across the table from Goofy and telling him how much I loved him...it never worked bye the way, she always saw through it.
One morning as we were sniping under our breaths at one another, Jerry stood up and made his way to the electric range where our milk was being heated for hot chocolate. He poured another cup then leaned against the range to get a better shooting angle at me while Mom wasn't looking.
What happened next I can still remember as though it was yesterday. Jerry's shirt tail was outside his jeans and it touched the hot coil on the electric range. Immediately the back of his shirt was ablaze with fire shooting an entire foot above his head. He dropped the milk and began fumbling with the buttons trying to get the shirt off his body. I did nothing but scream and cry, it was as if my butt was frozen to the chair.
Mom turned from the sink where she had been standing with a glass of water and threw it across his back to put out the flames. What the water didn't get she beat out with her hands until, finally, the flames were extinguished.
As it turned out, except for his understandable fear, he wasn't hurt at all. The shirt, however, was another matter but that didn't seem to bother anyone that morning.
"I thought you hated your brother." Mom said to me. "Just now, when you thought he was dying, you screamed for me to help him, that doesn't sound like hate to me...it sounds like love."
OH GOD! What a horrible reality...I did love Jerry after all. Though it still took a little time for us to adjust to it, we began a better relationship with one another after that fateful morning.
The events that morning happened forty years ago when we were children. Jerry joined the Navy at sixteen and I didn't see him again for years. As adults we got along well and had a mutual respect for one another. He married, had children and retired outside Jacksonville, Florida.
The last time I was able to tell my brother just how much I really loved him all those years was in December of 1990 as he died of cancer. He was coherent
until the end so we laughed a lot about our childhood and the way we treated one another but I'll never forget our last conversation.
"I love you." I softly told him as I rubbed his brow.
"I love you too, Sis." He told me as he squeezed my hand for the last time.
