An A-hole at Xmas?

Sounds like there's issues between the brother and the girlfriend.
P.S.: The effort of multiple gifts for someone you've never even met was unnecessary.

 

uni, i have something to tell you: your brother is probably gay. he has a live-in boyfriend, not girlfriend. let me guess, it's a gender-neutral name like pat, or something even more suspect like danny (dani...danielle)? just tell bro you're not homophobic and he'll feel ok introducing you to his new love. better yet, pay a surprise visit.

 

Whoa!

 

If anything, that would be one entertaining phone call.

 

It's 10:20. What do you mean breakfast is over? I want something from the breakfast menu!!!

 

"Also, if breakfast is at 10 and it's so great, why arrive 20 minutes late?"

Bingo. This is what stood out to me more than anything in Uni's original post.

You show up 20 minutes late, the food is gone, and it's their fault? I don't think so, and it also makes me doubt the rest of the story.

 

This is simply a draft of an excerpt from something I'm working on. But it's Christmas-related and pizza-related, so I thought I'd share it.

One Christmas, a few years after my parents returned from Germany to a dying trailer park on Mattoon’s southern edge, my grandfather walked into the house after a night of heavy drinking. The room was bulging with family. My father’s three sisters and two brothers were there, and each brought children. In all, there were more than 30 people in the home, many of them positioned on the dirty floor or straddling the arms of sofas that had gone out of fashion even before my father was born. But all fell silent when grandpa stumbled in.
My father’s youngest sister, Linda, was something of a pill. Perhaps it was the incestuous rape, if that actually occurred. I heard whispers of such behavior, but I never really knew what to believe in a family where whispers were more common than hugs. And it didn’t seem like the sort of question one might ask grandpa.
In any case, the silence was brief. You see, Linda had wanted pizza, but grandpa had taken off with the pizza money, which he spent on the liquor. After a long episode of sobbing and screeching, somebody gave Linda a $10 bill and somebody else phoned in the order for a pizza, which had been delivered just minutes before grandpa's arrival.

Still, Linda shouted and cursed. Grandpa didn’t like this, so he let her know by slamming his foot into the ottoman so hard that Linda and her precious pizza toppled onto the floor. She crashed into the piping-hot gas furnace, and everybody froze as my grandfather walked out the door, stomped twice on the rickety wood-planked side porch and weaved his way into the shed.

Now, he wasn’t just heading out there to cool off. He was calling it a night. Earlier on Christmas Eve, he had introduced me and a cousin to his new home, the one where my father and uncles had agreed he could live after a similar, but more vicious, physical outburst. The floors were bare, and by that I mean that they were covered in an inch-thick powder-like dirt. There were cracks in the walls where entire boards had rotted, cracked and been blown by high winds through the alleyway to lord knows where. I remember the newspapers most. They were piled in a corner, flies buzzing above them. Newspaper, I learned, soaked up the piss and shit quite well.

The only other imagines I have from that brief introduction to my grandfather’s decidedly progressing insanity were of a refrigerator filled with cheap beer and nude pin-up posters he literally tore from girlie mags. I can still see him standing there, spitting his thick tobacco juice and booming out one side of his mouth as though he were Casey Stengel at the mound to deliver instructions.

 

Filled with holiday cheer!

 

hm, you weren't kidding when you said that stuff about your family. wow.

 

It's worth noting here that I might have left out a few graphs that relate to the setting. It wasn't my house. It was my grandfather's house. You couldn't have packed that many people into our trailer. As a sidenote, we sold that trailer to my aunt a few years later. it burned down, and she lost everything she owned.

 

I'm not huge on obligations either (and working the holidays all these years limits some), but I make it a point to show up early or on time to wherever we're going. It's an approach that has served me well. And I can relate to needing to make sure Mrs. Editude is not hungry. I've learned that when she asks "Are you hungry?" that it means I need to find her something to eat. Now.

 

I've had three wives/girlfriends in a row that were absolutely horrifyingly cranky when hungry. I mean, "Find me food now, or you're dead!"