Brothers and Sisters Read Online Free

weakly.
    ‘You did do it for me, didn’t you? You weren’t just bored?’
    ‘Of course I did it for you,’ she says, smiling as she lowers her lips to the cup. She’s looking up over the rim now—I can see dark smudges in the crumpled hollows beneath her eyes, irises milky green with failing sight. Today she’s applied a fish-scale shimmer above her eyelid, too much on one side. Her lashes, just a few, are like broken stitches, and her eyebrows have completely disappeared apart from a couple of in-grown hairs. Lately she’s been talking about having them tattooed back on, but she says it costs too much. And besides, she’s too old, she’ll be dead soon. I’ve noticed she’s since invested in a pencil from Woolworths, approaching her brow bone like a landscape artist with impressionistic flair. I’ve seen the pencil in her pink make-up bag in the bathroom when I’ve looked through her things, curiously examining the facial fluff collected on its worn stub where she’s dragged it savagely across her skin.
    I say to her, ‘I think you need to rub your eyebrows in a bit. Just lick your finger and give them a rub.’
    She tosses her head, taps the table with her nail as she observes the room with a critical stare.
    ‘Don’t look like that, now. I didn’t draw those barbs on you. You did,’ I tease.
    But the nail keeps tapping, slowly, like the tail on a cat.
    ‘You’re mocking me,’ she says in a leaden tone.
    I seem to be very good at mocking her. My siblings, on the other hand, I’ve noticed treat her with special reverence, as I suppose a mother should be treated, honouring her as it says offspring should in the Ten Commandments. We wish for her twilight years to be as free from pain as possible , one wrote to me in a rare email last year. Please take good care of her.
    ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I ask her. ‘What have you been saying I do to you?’
    My mother often tells me my siblings actually look up to me these days.
    ‘And why would that be?’ I say, disbelieving.
    ‘Because you’ve traversed the world, you’ve done big things.’ She is flattering me.
    ‘ Big things! ’ I say. ‘You mean because I have a university degree.
    Oh please. That’s not big things .’
    ‘Well it is to some,’ she says, and then she goes on about them being good, simple people over there, earthy, with their hearts in the right place, as though that’s got something to do with me having a degree.
    ‘Where exactly are you going with this?’ I say, and she says she doesn’t know, she has no idea at all.
    ‘They have their own lives now,’ my mother says when I ask if she misses them. ‘They have their own families and partners. You don’t keep your children forever.’
    ‘But they’re all still there, aren’t they? Sharing their lives. And we’re not.’
    ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she says with a shrug. ‘I don’t know how much time they actually spend together. Birthdays, maybe. Christmas or New Year, perhaps.’
    I often find myself thinking about them all when I’m out jogging. It’s usually towards the end when I’m tiring and I need that extra boost to get me home. I square my shoulders and look straight ahead, but on the sides of the road I can hear them calling to me, whipping their fists. Go, Bubba, go , they cry . You can do it, Bubba. And it’s then I feel my heart bursting and my legs breaking into a gallop, as though I’m heading for the finish line, the gold medal.
    My mother is staring into space now, her jaw quite set when she’s not remembering to smile.
    ‘What are you looking at?’ she says with a start.
    ‘Nothing,’ I say.
    ‘You were looking at me. Very critically. I know you were.’
    ‘You weren’t even on my mind,’ I say drolly.
    ‘Hmmm. Charming,’ she says, and she pistol-grips her chin and looks narrowly down her nose at me.
    ‘Don’t even try to look intelligent,’ I say. ‘You look like some D-grade actor.’
    She laughs. ‘Oh. Am I so