The Secret Deletion

My oldest brother is a complete asshole. No, seriously, he earns that opinion yet again every time I have to see him. He is seriously one of the most profoundly horrible human beings I’ve ever met in my life — I always envied other little girls who had nice brothers who played with them.

I cannot recall a single pleasant interaction with him. He is breathtakingly selfish and narcissistic; I’ve remarked many times that he was born a bitter, envious old man. To him, human interaction is a series of canine-level dominance contests, and he always has to be top dog. His idea of wacky childhood fun consisted of teasing and beating up his little sisters. He doesn’t smile in photos, he just bares his teeth. Indeed, the only times I can recall him truly smiling and laughing was when he was hurting someone else.

I was always his particular target because I could stand up for myself, and by the time I was five I avoided him like the plague. He seemed to take it as a personal insult when I went on my first date at fifteen, because at eighteen he had never had a girlfriend. Women have always seemed to sense that he was bad news.

He finally found a woman willing to date him in his mid-twenties, and he was just as bad of a boyfriend as he was of a brother. He and “Bethie” seemed to always be squabbling with each other over the phone. She wanted to get married and have children, and my brother didn’t, so that was a continual bone of contention between them. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to marry him, let alone have his children. It’s a relief that he’s now reached his fifties as a childless bachelor, because I know he’s got no qualms about hitting women. Any child of his would probably spend years in therapy trying to remedy the abuse he would inflict on them.

It became a pattern: Bethie would try to bring up the subject of marriage and children, and my brother would have a temper tantrum at her. They would break up, but then after a few days she would call him and beg him to take her back. I kept hoping she would wise up and get free of him, but then she’d call and apologize, and he’d grudgingly take her back. I could never remember if they were on or off at any given moment.

They squabbled incessantly all through my freshman year of college, and must have broken up and gotten back together five or six times that year. I was beyond sick of the way he talked to her, and couldn’t understand why she tolerated such disrespect.

One evening late in the year, I was up in my room while everyone else was downstairs watching some loud TV show. As such, I was the only one who heard the upstairs phone ring. I didn’t feel like answering it, so I let whomever it was leave a message on the answering machine.

It was Bethie, crying, and she made the most abject and cringe-inducing apology I had ever heard, ending with a tearful little plea for my brother to take her back. Just listening to her made my teeth hurt.

I glanced down the stairs — everybody else seemed to still be glued to whatever was on TV.

So I played back her message, then hit the Delete button. Bethie’s message disappeared with a little beep.

Then I went back into my room and never said a word about it to anyone.

Wouldn’t you know it, they stayed broken up that time. My brother went on to get dumped by two other women in his thirties and forties.

And Bethie? She recently popped up on Facebook as a person I might know. She had a different last name and was about thirty years older, but I still recognized her. Just for grins I opened her Facebook page and looked it over.

Oh sweet, there she was with her husband celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Their two adult children were in the anniversary picture too. Everyone was smiling brightly. I was glad to see she had gotten the lovely family she had wanted so much.

Sometimes you’ve got to be a little bit evil to be kind.