Free Another Broken Wizard by Colin Dodds

Emily.’”
    Across from me, in her rocking chair and pink bathrobe, blowing on her tea between sips, Emily looked like she was dressed up like an old woman for Halloween. She leaned forward for her wide-eyed impersonation of Aunt Peggy.
    “So I think—A—Peggy’s going to start talking about Jesus, because that was sort of her thing in the eighties, or—B—she’s going to ask to borrow money. I’m bracing myself for either. And she starts saying that people will lie about you, that they’ll do anything just to keep you down, and that you just have to ignore them. So after like twenty minutes, she gets to the point—she wants me to sell sports drinks. It was a pyramid scheme.”
    “It would almost be better if it was Jesus,” I said.
    “I know. At least Jesus has some kind of track record. And then she got all mad when I called it a pyramid scheme. It’s a ‘vertical entrepreneurial paradigm,’ she kept saying, and going on about the testimonials she had in her car.”
    “Did she get you the testimonials?”
    “No, she got drunk and started telling me and my cousins about what sluts our mothers used to be, and how she always suspected our dead uncle was secretly gay.”
    We laughed some more and fleshed out our recaps. Finally, she asked me what I had planned for the next day.
    “I have to drop off my rental car and get ready for Dad’s surgery. But I’m going to be stuck in a hospital, then the rehab facility, and then in the apartment after that, so I’m up for something tomorrow.”
“I can’t believe you’re back for so long.”
“Well, someone has to help out. Mom’s out of the picture and he doesn’t have any other family.”
“It’s a good thing that you’re doing.”
    “Yeah. When I made my plans, I was all pumped up on being the good guy and all that jazz. That was the story I’d told myself. The story made it easy.”
    “Well, it’s true. It’s not just a story.”
    “It feels like a story. In the story, everything was alright. I was alright. My childhood was alright. And Mom leaving Dad was just one more thing that had happened, distant, like the election or something. But I was in New York, with a girlfriend and job prospects, and so it had all worked out for the best. But now … it’s like …”
    “It’s like you’re stuck here.”
    “Yeah. And it’s harder to tell myself that all’s well that ends well. Now, I don’t know. I’m just trying to keep my head above water.”
    “Then I don’t know if you’ll be up for going to see Jeff tomorrow.”
    Jeff was one of my best friends in high school, and he’d dated Emily. He was a funny, good-natured guy. But something happened to him in his first year of college, and he had to drop out. Back in high school, I’d taken my fair share of drugs with him, and at first I’d tried to calculate my share of the blame. But blame didn’t matter as much as the diagnosis, which was that Jeff was schizophrenic. In the last few years, we’d fallen out of touch. Maybe that was just moving on. But it had a taint to it.
“Oh shit, I am such a prick. He called me at Thanksgiving and I never called him back,” I said.
“Don’t feel bad. I live here. I’ve been putting him off all semester. I mean, I love the guy … But I’m also out of excuses.”
“Is it that bad?”
    “We talk on the phone every few weeks. He has his good days and bad days. They keep changing up his medication, so you never really know what you’re going to get. Some days, he’s mostly there. But more often, he’s out of it. And those calls just suck. It would be a lot more fun for me if you went,” Emily said, pursing her lips.
    “Sure. I’ll go. Can I have some tea?”
    Back in the kitchen, Emily and I drank tea and talked more about Jeff—how it was hard to tell if the problem was the schizophrenia or the medication, how he wasn’t really there a lot of the time, how he’d put on weight, and so on. It was an old conversation, a ceremony of