Here is a chronological recounting of the events of the past however many months of shit upon utter shit that has been going on. Intermittently, I'll be adding my thoughts and feelings, both current and what they were when the whole shebang was happening because as time stretches on they morph into bitter, decrepit little creatures that scurry around my brain at night.
Are you ready? Here we go:
It was a lovely day, Thursday March 25th, 2010, to be exact, I was in downtown Iowa City with a couple friends perusing the art galleries. It was one of the first nice spring days, I barely needed the coat I was wearing. I had just finished staring at a particularly lovely piece, wishing I had $1000 dollars to drop on artwork, when my phone rang. I didn't recognize the number so I didn't answer, as usual. A message was left but I decided to check it once we were done in the gallery. Then I got a text from the same number that called; it was my brother, Jayson, whom I had only spoken three sentences, at most, to in the past five years. I called him back and he informed me that he'd be in town later that evening and wondered if I'd like to have dinner with him. I'd always yearned for an actual relationship with my brother, even though he was a stifling 20 years my senior, so I accepted. His only request was that I not tell mom and dad which I hadn't planned on anyway because I just had a feeling that it was something I didn't need to tell them. I was brought up on a strictly need-to-know diet of information within the family; not telling was basically in my genes.
I rushed home to straighten my apartment, get ready for the evening, and frantically call Shawn to speculate why this meeting was happening. I stayed on the phone with Shawn right up until I saw Jayson pull up outside my building. He came inside to see my place then we went for a short drive. I showed him the school I was attending, we chatted about my plans of what I was going to do after I was finished at this school, and we stopped at Petland to look at puppies. The whole endeavor was quite nonchalant and easy. We then headed over to Coralville to eat and chose Outback Steakhouse. Once we'd ordered, we got down to business. He wanted to know what I knew of the recent events that had been going on with my sister. It had been a long couple of months in regards to her shenanigans and so it took me a while to relay all the information that my mother had told me. Once I was finished, he began a long story that began with him going to college (which was a strange move back in time after just talking about my sister in the present and I was quite curious as to where the whole thing was going). This is the tale he told:
He was going off to college. Mom and dad had bought him a car, had it insured, and told him to not even worry about looking into aid for tuition; they had it under control. Being his parents and all, he went off to college worry-free (at least about the financial aspect of it). Second semester rolled around and he began receiving letters that his tuition had not been paid. He asked mom about it and she said she had paid it and that the school must have misplaced the check. Since his tuition wasn't paid and no one was owning up to the fact that it hadn't, he had to stop going. Understandably, he did not want to move back home so he started looking for a place to live. When attempting to rent an apartment, he found that his credit score was very bad. This didn't make sense to him since he didn't have credit to begin with; how could it get bad? Upon looking into it, he found that mom and dad had put utilities in his name and never paid for them. He also found out, around this time, that mom had taken a substantial amount of money from her parents, his grandparents, who had done a lot of his raising as a child. He worked for a year and paid off the debt from the utilities, his school debt, and the money back to his grandparents. He also got married during this time to a wonderful woman to whom he is still married today. Then he went back to college and paid for it. Himself.
I was frozen with terror when he finished. A few things bothered me about this story. The first being all of the times my mother had told people that my brother had gone to school on a full ride golf scholarship. When I brought that up to him, he shared that back when it was happening and up until about ten years ago, she would tell people that she was paying for his schooling. So my mother was lying. Big time. The next point was that the lead up to the bad things happening to my brother almost mirrored my situation: my rent, my tuition, my food, my car, my everything was being paid for by my parents. My head was swimming with fears about how much trouble I could be in at that very moment without even being aware of it.
As if that wasn't enough, he had more, lots more, to tell me before the night was finished.
But that story will be reserved for Pt. 2. Stay tuned.
