Page 6 of The Wrong Family

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.

For their thirteenth birthday, they’d both been given little glass bowls with betta fish from their aunt Shea. A week later Dakota found that his betta had gone to the ocean in the sky. He’d stormed into the bedroom she shared with Chelsea and snatched the bowl from her desk. Winnie had tried to stop him, but he was already a foot taller than her and he held the bowl above his head, sloshing water on her face as she reached for it. He’d darted to the bathroom, then flushed Winnie’s very alive fish down the toilet along with his dead one as she wailed in protest. “Fair’s fair,” he’d said, pulling the lever. He’d felt bad as soon as he’d done it and had burst into tears. Winnie had forgiven him, of course, but sometimes all these memories came together in a very uncomfortable way. If he’d been like that with his twin sister, what was he like now with his wife, Manda?

Nigel was waiting for her to say something. She pushed her thoughts away. “I know—jeez—I know. He never recovered from Dad’s death. But he’s family, so we’ll just have to work this out. Be patient with him. Everyone can chip in.” Her voice was falsely positive. She sounded like a drunk cheerleader. And he wasn’t just family, he was her twin. There was extra responsibility that came with that.

After fifteen years of marriage, Winnie knew his stance without him having to say it—Nigel disagreed. He did not think Dakota and Manda were going to work it out. This was not his problem, nor was this his brother, nor did he believe in the twin bond. He didn’t want to chip in.There were perks to being an only child, Winnie assumed bitterly, and while Dakota moving in with them may have been a completely normal thing to Winnie, she knew that to Nigel, it felt like an extreme breach of privacy. Dakota lacked the respect of a good houseguest: he was a slob. He left dirty dishes all over the house, the remnants of frozen burritos congealing in red lumps, empty beer cans stacked on counters—and the tissues. Oh, God, every time he stayed with them there was so much crying. Nigel called them snotflakes—little hardened wads of white that made their house look like it was decorated for Christmas. Then there was the drinking problem, which had led to the horrifying moment for Samuel.

“Well, he’ll be there when you get home,” Winnie said. “He stopped by for the key. He can stay in the blue bedroom.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are you mad? You sound mad.”

“I’m mad,” he said. “But it doesn’t make a difference because you already moved him in without talking to me about it.”

Winnie said nothing.

“If he so much as looks at me the wrong way, Winnie…”

“I know, I know,” she said. Her breath exhaled in a whoosh. She could picture his chin dipped, eyes narrowed, pressing his tongue up against his front teeth. “I warned him,” she said. “I swear it’ll be okay. He’s in a bad place, but he’ll behave.”

When Winnie got home thirty minutes later, she found Dakota on his knees installing the doorbell Nigel himself had failed to install for some weeks. It was a peace offering. She watched him for a few seconds, dreading the whole night ahead of her; she’d get a decent serving of guilt from Nigel, and Samuel would turn his moodiness inward. Her concern for her son was already consuming her, and this was only going to make it worse. Why Winnie had said yes to this she did not know. Actually, she did know: her sister was a bully and Winnie was about as easy to manipulate as a hungry dog. Dakota had music playing as he worked, a whiny country song. She heard him humming along to it and her heart softened. She still saw her brother as a little boy.

“Hey, you.” Her brother jumped at the sound of her voice. He was still wearing his uniform—Nigel always said he looked like a baked potato in his courier uniform. Dakota stood up, suddenly reminding Winnie of how tall he was. He resembled their father, six-four and beefy. Winnie had to bend her head back a little to look into her brother’s face, which was contrite. His red-rimmed eyes wouldn’t meet hers when he said, “I’m really appreciative you all are letting me stay. Manda…”

At the sound of his wife’s name on his own tongue, the six-foot-four-inch brute of a man burst into tears. And that was the moment Nigel pulled into the driveway.

Winnie seated Dakota at the dinette, and Nigel made tea for the three of them. It was something his mother did when someone was upset. She watched as he handled the little bags of tea and the cubes of sugar. He poured a few beats of whiskey into his and Winnie’s mugs, noticeably skipping Dakota’s, and Winnie held her tongue. She knew better than to give Nigel a hard time about drinking, especially after forcing Dakota on him. She felt she’d need the alcohol herself. Dakota took the mug gratefully.

Winnie sucked the warm liquid between her teeth and eyed Dakota over the rim of her mug. Her sisters still crooned about how handsome he was, but she was starting to see the emergence of a much scruffier man. He’d had a six-pack through high school and college, and despite living in a cold, rainy state, he’d spent much of his adolescence shirtless to let everyone know. Sitting close to him now, Winnie could see that his hair was thinning and his nose was starting to take on the bulbous appearance of a seasoned alcoholic.

“You should shower, dude, shave. You’ll feel better.” Nigel was eyeing Dakota with much less tact than she had. She meant to give Nigel a look to say he’d crossed a line, but Dakota nodded solemnly.

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