I was at home skipping school when I heard the scrape of keys in the lock. I flew up the stairs just as two voices came in from the cold. It was Anthony, just home from the Marines. Not recognizing the other voice, I wondered who it was until Tony asked, “So how long you been hookin’?” and then, a moment later, “How much is this gonna cost me anyway?”
A prostitute!
I sat at the top of the stairs and listened.
My breathing slowed.
I wondered what would happen and how it would sound. But in the end, all Anthony did was talk. He used his time with the hooker as a sort of therapy and shared his concerns about what to do with his life, our family, how hard it was to be home from the Marines.
“I hate it here,” he said. “My mother’s always on my back. None of them really get me.”
“What about your sisters?” The hooker seemed to be probing for a bright spot.
“They’re all pains in the ass, except for maybe Steph.”
I had to hold myself back.
All the times I had worried over Anthony before he’d left for the service came flooding to me—times he’d been chased by groups of boys or had walked miles in winter without gloves or had stood up on the altar as Jesus, me biting my lips as he stumbled through the Hebrew in the crucifixion scene. Now, at the top of the stairs, eavesdropping on his confession to a prostitute, I was torn between wanting to kill him and to continue concealing my presence.
In the end, I simply sat there, waiting.
And, as if my brother’s disloyalty and preference for Stephanie weren’t enough, I found myself deeply disappointed. I had learned nothing more about sex—certainly less than having a prostitute in one’s living room seemed to have promised.