A Year of Stories

Jacob's Family Portrait

1.

When I was 14 years old, my parents commissioned a painting.

It was to commemorate the "completion" of our family. We were five now – me, my sister Lena, my mother, my father and newly minted baby Jacob.

Jacob had been "a gift." A gift in that vaguely contradictory way that only people of a certain generation and certain religious predilections could conceive of. These days we would be more apt to call him a mistake.

Mom was 43 and Dad was five years older than that, and both probably thought their child bearing years were well behind them.

And yet...there he was – 7.5 pounds, blue eyes to match our dad, copper hair a near mirror of our mom's, and beautiful in a way the rest of us never could be.

We all adored him, and I most of all.

I'd wanted a brother for as long as I could remember, since Mom explained the difference between boys and girls to me after Lena was born –

"Girl's create life, and boy's protect it."

Before you ask, yes, Mom said it exactly like that.

She had this folksy, simplistic way of looking at the world. She had lived in America for more than half her life, but like dad she wasn't born here. They were from somewhere they called "the old country," a country they never mentioned by name, but instead held in reserve as an excuse to tell us cringe-worthy things about the importance of respect, the proper role of the sexes, or why we shouldn't talk to Chuck and Aaron, the friendly gentlemen who lived together downstairs.

A lot of it I ignored even then, but her description of the fundamental difference between Men and Women, made a certain kind of sense. At least it did to someone who still hadn't fully mastered the art of tying his own shoes.

From what I understood, Lena had an important job to do, but it was one that I was wholly uninterested in. Girls were supposed to prepare themselves for whatever alchemy was required to bring little humans into the world. Meanwhile, boys got to punch and kick and stab things in order to keep them safe. The punching bit was something I thought I could use some help with, which is why I wanted a brother.

Lucky for me, Jacob was the best brother anyone could hope for, and the entire family knew it, which is why I shouldn't have been so surprised when on Jacob's third birthday, Mom came to us with a plan.

"Dad and I have just commissioned a family portrait. For the next week, a painter will be coming in to draw us. You don't have to do anything special, but you might have to sit still for a little while. Is that alright with you two?"

Lena agreed immediately. We didn't get visitors very often, and a painter would be exotic, perhaps even "cute." Cute was a concept she was only now coming to understand, much to my mother's disdain.

I was a little more incredulous.