Free Nowhere To Run by Carolyn Davidson

just so awful.”
    “Yeah,” Alex agreed. “It is awful.”
    “And I thought we’d see more of her after last Christmas. I liked her.”
    Alex took a gardening glove from the armrest of his chair and threw it lightly at his sister. “Not prying, huh?”
    Susan had joined them for Christmas Day the previous year. It had seemed like a good idea: his family was as casual as you can get short of wearing pajamas to dinner, and he knew Susan would be alone otherwise. She didn’t talk much about her private life, but he knew her mother died when she was young and her father was pretty well out of the picture. He and Olivia had lost their parents nine years earlier in a car accident, and he understood the feeling of being suddenly alone in the world; of the ties to what lay behind you being severed. He was lucky to have Olivia and her family. They kept a sense of tradition and continuity in his life he might otherwise have lost.
    Susan had mentioned vague plans of taking a holiday somewhere warm when Alex first broached the subject, but when he pressed her she admitted she would be staying home. “Laying low,” she put it. “Some old movies and good wine, my slippers. Just what the doctor ordered”.
    Alex had to admit it sounded like a pretty appealing way to spend the holiday, but not alone. So he had worked on her until she gave in, promising her that she was saving him from a penance of being the odd duck out amidst a cosy family of four.
    It hadn’t gone well, likely due to the ambiguous nature of their relationship. What was strange about bringing a friend to a family dinner, he asked himself again now. Absolutely nothing. But one of the girls had asked Susan upon introduction if she was her uncle’s girlfriend, and from Susan’s stammered rebuttal and accompanying blush, two things he didn’t think were in her repertoire of physical reactions, there was an uncomfortable air about the day.
    It didn’t help that Tony furthered the awkwardness with his attempt at suggestive jibes dropped throughout the afternoon. Tony, Alex shook his head, still nettled by the memory. What a guy. Her sister could have done worse, he’d seen his share of domestic violence and other assorted lowlifes on the job, but he was no first prize in Alex’s opinion.
    Hard to believe his sister’s wedding would have been close to eight years ago now. Scary stuff. Alex had given his approval – with no parents around to do the job he had felt it his big brother duty, not that he’d had any problem doing it. And maybe he was being too hard on the guy now. But the laidback guy who used to be a laugh over dinner and drinks, who’d even passed some beer fuelled afternoons with him on the golf course, hitting the balls mostly on the wrong sides of the greens, had somehow turned into a stolid middle aged man who complained more than he joked. Maybe that was just the natural progression, Alex considered, of marriage, or time in general.
    God forbid. Alex shook the grim bent of thoughts from his head. Fact is, there was something to be said about waking up to two coffee cups instead of one, planning what to have for dinner with someone besides the frozen aisle at the supermarket. Alex stood, taking the last swig of the beer and ruffling his sister’s hair affectionately. Stopping to elicit more giggles from his nieces with a feigned stagger through the leaf pile they were building, he walked towards his car. Time to head out before he officially turned into a maudlin middle aged bachelor, bemoaning a lack of companionship and a cosy home front.
    *
    Olivia took her brother’s place in the reclining lawn chair, and drank the last mouthful of the beer he had left behind as she watched her children playing in the leaves. She heard the crunch of tires on the gravel and turned her head to watch Alex’s jeep back out of the driveway, picking up speed as it turned onto the road.
    She worried about him still, perhaps needlessly, but that was what big