“And you’re my only bitchy cousin.”
The summer we turned twelve was the summer he officially became my “bitchy cousin.” The whole extended family went to a lake house. My uncle had a boat. There were tubes to be pulled, fish to be caught, and a rope swing that had probably killed at least two people in the 80s. It was perfect.
But I didn’t have her patience. I was a feral, barefoot girl who climbed pecan trees and fought with snapping turtles. Bradley and I were oil and water—except the oil was also complaining about the water’s pH balance.
My grandmother just smiled and said, “Well, bless his heart. He gets that from his father’s side.” My Only Bitchy Cousin Is a Yankee-Type Guy- The...
I pushed him off the dock.
I finally snapped at the Christmas Eve dinner when I was seventeen. Bradley had just finished a five-minute monologue about how Southern barbecue was “conceptually inferior to a properly smoked brisket from Kansas City.” He said “conceptually inferior” about my daddy’s pulled pork. My daddy, who had been up since 4 a.m. tending the smoker.
Aunt Patty, who had just driven four hours through Atlanta traffic, looked like she was considering using those discrete units to commit a felony. “And you’re my only bitchy cousin
The room went quiet. My mother put her hand on my arm. Bradley just looked at me for a long moment. Then he did something I’d never seen him do.
Bradley refused to swim because the lake had “fecal coliform counts.” He wouldn’t eat the fried catfish because it was “unnecessarily greasy.” And when I finally got him to sit on the dock with his feet in the water— just his feet —he looked at me and said, with the gravity of a Supreme Court justice, “You know, your accent makes you sound like you have a learning disability.”
He still corrects my grammar. I still threaten to push him off the dock. But now when he says “It’s ‘fewer’ not ‘less,’” I say, “Bless your heart, Bradley.” And for some reason, that’s become the nicest thing either of us knows how to say. It was perfect
“It’s ‘fewer rolls,’ not ‘less rolls,’ Aunt Patty. Rolls are discrete units.”
That night, after everyone went to bed, I found him on the back porch, looking at the stars. The sky in Georgia is nothing like the sky in Connecticut. He had a beer—a Miller Lite, because he was still a Yankee-Type Guy and couldn’t drink a proper sweet ale to save his life.
“Why do you come down here every year if everything we do is wrong, everything we eat is garbage, and everything we say sounds stupid to your fancy Yankee ears?”