Prompt: Write about a family member holding onto a grudge

I was elbow deep in dishes, carefully scrubbing away some rice that had burned at the bottom of a pot when my husband brought it up.

“Jeffery called.”

My body clenched. I hadn’t heard him say his brother’s name in years. I turned off the water and turned to him. He sat down the plate he was drying.

“Did you pick up?”

He shook his head no. Emotions swelled up like vomit, but I pushed them down.

“My mom called though. He’s trying to make amends, but I told her that was out of the question.”

I turned back toward the sink, picking up the pot and scrubbing harder, putting more weight into the sponge.

“Good.”

“She said he’s clean now. Went to some kind of treatment center.”

I sighed, “Baby, I really don’t want to talk about him.”

He let out a long breath as if he’d been holding it. “She invited him to Christmas.”

“What?” I turned too quickly, knocking a wine glass over with my elbow, its delicate frame smashing against the marble countertop.

“Fuck!”

My hands shook as I turned toward the shards of glass and began picking them up. “Fuck!” I exclaimed even more loudly as a piece sliced through my finger.

“Here, let me.”

I wrapped a paper towel around my bleeding finger, watching a red circle grow like a ripple in the lake. My eyes began to tear as I clenched my hand into a fist.

“Well, we aren’t going then. We can just do Christmas with my family.”

“Yeah, yeah of course.”

“How could she do this,” my voice rose, no longer able to choke my emotions down as I felt myself back in the hospital room. The beeping monitor, the smell of disinfectant, the stream of doctors with interchangeable faces who seemed only capable of sharing bad news.

“We can get a second opinion,” Frederick had whispered to me as I cried into his shoulder from my seat in the hospital chair. But months later, the specialist we saw five states away told us the same thing: Geneveve would never walk again.

It was just one night, it would be fine, we had reasoned. Jeffrey had assured us he couldn’t wait to spend time with his “favorite niece.”

But it wasn’t fine.

No one knew Jeff had been drinking again. He’d covered it up, drinking non-alcoholic beers at family dinners and talking about how life changing his AA meetings had been. But on that night seven years ago, he’d run out of beer and placed Geneveve into the car seat we’d carefully buckled into the back of his Toyota.

As he neared the liquor store, he didn’t notice that the light before him was red or the approaching car that would soon smash into his niece’s side.