Broken Record

Chapter 7

“Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.” -Cary Grant

Thanksgiving was not a fun time for Nick. Sure he loved the food and he loved football but that didn’t make up for his family. More specifically, the women in his family.

You see, his mother and grandmother didn’t always get along. Well they did, but only after a few drinks. Just a few glasses of wine was enough to get them all buddy buddy.

It wasn’t that they would be getting along, it was the avalanche of embarrassing stories that came with that. Within an hour Nick would learn about every relationship the two had ever had and the sexual prowess of those partners.

It got even worse two hours in. That’s when they stopped telling stories, or at least whole stories, and just mentioned a phrase or word and would collapse in giggles. It made Nick scared for when he was old.

The third hour was when his aunt, Rachel, would decide she was fed up with them not speaking to her all night (she didn’t drink so, like Nick, she did not find the humor in their drunkenness.

She would first begin by sighing very loudly.

Then she would tap her foot.

Then she would grab the TV remote and flip through the channels.

Then she would settle on the most obnoxious show possible and turn the volume up very high.

Finally, she would turn off the TV and leave the room, usually saying something about how inconsiderate they were. Aunt Rachel was a champion at being passive aggressive. Nick was pretty sure that’s what she had majored in in college.

It wasn’t until the fourth hour, when the dishes had been washed and the football game over, that Nick was able to enjoy the one other thing he liked about Thanksgiving: sneaking beer with his cousin, Theo.

As previously noted, Nick did not like drinking. More specifically, he did not like being drunk. But Thanksgiving was the one time he didn’t care about that. His mother was drinking so she didn’t notice and they always had to stay at the house since his mother was always too drunk to get into the car so there was no issue.

Also, it wasn’t really sneaking beer. It was more Theo grabbing two beers from the fridge while Nick’s mom and their grandmother continued their little performance and walking to the back porch with Nick. Gwendolyn played with Theo’s younger sister, Lissa.

Theo was Nick’s favorite cousin, which wasn’t saying much. On his mom’s side he only had Theo and Lissa while on his dad’s he had… He didn’t really know.

Theo did not mind that it was not a huge deal that he was Nick’s favorite cousin. Nick was his favorite cousin and he only had him and Gwendolyn. He didn’t know anything about his father’s side either.

Not only were the women in Nick’s family utterly predictable, they also had the bad luck of choosing shitty husbands. His grandfather had left when Aunt Rachel, his mom was the oldest of the two, was six months old. His mom was two. He had been a drunk and in the long run they were probably better off, but his grandmother’s long line of equally shitty boyfriends had screwed his mom and Aunt Rachel up.

Aunt Rachel had married first. Her first husband, Ted, whom Theo was named for, left her when Theo was seven. Ted was not a bad man per say, he and Aunt Rachel were just bad for each other. Uncle Ted remarried to a woman he was not bad for and that was not bad for him and Theo stayed with them on some weekends.

It wasn’t the worst situation. They had no children together so there was no stepchild drama. Aunt Rachel didn’t like that Uncle Ted had moved on and that she was alone but made no effort to keep Theo from his father. Uncle Ted even had Nick, Gwendolyn, and Lissa over a few times.