*
Jan was flustered when she came through the front door.
This was somewhat normal for her since she recently took an office job downtown to help us make ends meet. She’s a writer, but a lot of her freelance work has dried up in the pandemic.
I’m home from college for a few weeks, and I’ve enjoyed being around her. We’re best friends, have been for most of our lives. I could tell when something was bothering her.
After years of watching my big sister sitting in the breakfast nook in the morning sun. tapping away on her laptop, humming that odd little song in her head and smiling at her own thoughts, she seemed like a different person now.
My sister is 26, in her prime in every sense, an educated, successful woman who could have any man or woman she wanted, tall and tanned, blonde hair cut in a sexy short, blunt-chop style that accents her blue-grey eyes and falls softly on her shoulders, which she likes to reveal in most everything she wears.
She’s a swimmer and has that swimmer’s body, long and lean with just the right amount of definition in her upper body and just a hint of swimmer’s hair, not so much damaged but not anything you’d ever see walking out of a salon. Not that she’d be caught dead in one of those.
She has that Texas wind-blown look. My sister is drop-dead gorgeous.
Jan dated off and on, once or twice getting serious before cutting off the relationships for reasons she kept to herself. There was a darkness there that I never knew the source of, and I never asked.
But when she was writing, she was the most serene and confident person I’d ever known. This new Jen, this office Jen I’d met a month or so ago, was not my sister.
My name is Malcolm, named for my father. My friends all call me Mal, which was the only opening my sister needed to call me by a long list of names using the prefix “mal” to entertain herself and her friends growing up.
If I was mad at something, she’d call me Malice or Dallas Malice, since we live in Fort Worth, just down the road from D-Town. If I were moody or needed space, she’d call me Malcontent. But the list seemed endless: Malnourished, Malpractice, Malefactor, Malaprop.
Lately, she’s been calling me Malcolm, so I know something’s not right.
So when she came through the door irritated and silent, I acknowledged her mood and left her alone. But that seemed to irritate her too.
“Are you just going to sit there and not say anything?” she finally asked, walking past me after having shed her work clothes. I must admit that her new work attire was hot. She wore power skirts with nylons and heels, silk white tops, loose fitting and sexy, dripping with gold from her neck and wrists.
I knew she was getting attention at the firm where she took a job as a legal researcher. I know how lawyers think. Her firm is the oldest in town, and the lawyers there are old money, mostly elderly men in their 60s and a few even in their 70s. Probably no more than a handful are older than 40, and no one other than gophers and clerks are anywhere near Jen’s age.
So when she came back downstairs in a tight pair of jeans, a Rolling Stones t-shirt and barefoot, I smiled.
“Welcome home,” I said, half kidding and half serious. I could’ve said “Welcome back,” and she’d know exactly what I meant.
She walked straight to the bar, poured herself a Vodka on ice, splashed some tonic in it and took a long swig.
“Yeah, I think I need home more than I realized,” she said, collapsing into the chair beside me, throwing her long legs under the glass table and stretching her painted toes while I watched and smiled.
She knew I was watching, but she didn’t comment, just taking another long swig of vodka, finishing it off before standing up to go pour another.
“Sure,” I said. “I’d love a drink.”
“Sorry,” she muttered, pouring another strong vodka tonic and placing in front of me, her hair brushing against my face, one of her tits touching my shoulder. She was braless, as she normally was around the house.
We were casual most of the time. I’ve been home a lot more since the pandemic, and I took full advantage of it. Jen and I settled into an easy lifestyle built around our unique situation.
I’ll explain.
Our parents died seven or eight years ago on a flight to Cancun that never made it. We don’t know all the details, since the plane crash occurred over the Gulf, and the bodies were never found.
I was 11 at the time, and Jen was 19. Our closest relatives were Aunt Mary and Uncle Jack, who was my mother’s brother. They lived in Dallas, so they ended up taking care of us for a couple of years. Jen was in school at SMU, but after a couple of years she moved home, enrolled at TCU and raised me own her own.
When she turned 21, she took full ownership of the house, invested the money Mom and Dad left us and arranged to pay off the house in five years. Which brings us to our current situation.
We still have all of our money we initially invested, most of it in oil and gas. I don’t know exactly how much we have, but Jen said neither of us needed to work again for the rest of our lives.
That didn’t sound like much of a plan to me or her, so she supported us on her freelance money until the pandemic. We were one year short on funds, so Jen took the job at Myers, Myers and Dunkirk, LLC.
She can walk away anytime she wants, pull money from one of our 401-Ks or IRAs and we’d be just fine. But that’s not how she wanted to do it, for reasons of her own.
Maybe it was none of my business, but I decided she was going to quit that job, one way or another.
My story is simple. After the tragedy, I was a lost soul until Jen would come home from college. I lived for her visits and summertime until she moved back for good. I played baseball and football, finished high school and went to TCU on a baseball scholarship.
I admit I’m not much of a student. None of us athletes are. We travel five months out of the year, take classes on computers, have our own tutors, some of whom do all the work for us, and in my case, I throw a baseball.
I’m a right-handed pitcher with a decent fastball, a curve I can sometimes control and a change-up I learned just this past year. Coach Earl let me start a handful of games, especially near the end of the season after we were eliminated from any post-season hopes.
My record was 4-3 with 4.39 ERA in 62 2/3 innings. I struck out 60 and walked 24. Not great but not bad for an 18-year-old freshman. I’m pretty sure I’ll be a lot more involved from now on.
I’ve grown since last year, a result of regular workouts and a diet provided by the Horned Frogs athletics department. I’m up to 6-2, 215, and let’s just say I’ve grown in every way imaginable. Jen mentioned it the first time I came home in May, and she’s seen plenty more since then.
We both walk around at night and the in mornings in what we sleep in. I sleep in a pair of TCU basketball shorts. She sleeps in a long t-shirt with some old rock n’ roll band on the front, anything from the Beach Boys or Pink Floyd to the Stones shirt she was wearing, the one with the big mouth open and a huge red tongue hanging out.