an eighty-year-old shut-in hypochondriac when she was twenty-five.”
“Not a nun!” Paisley shouts, holding her hands out like she’s surrendering. “Not a nun. No. Okay. Let me just come out and say it. Alright. I’m going to just tell you. Okay. I...” She looks around and clears her throat. “Yes, okay, I have been chosen to go on a year-long mission trip to Chad!”
I can hear Henry breathing heavy from his run. I can hear the shuffle of my mother’s slippers, I assume as she attempts not to faint. I can hear my father’s wordless fury.
Then it all explodes as only a Murphy family catastrophe can.
“Chad?” Dad pounds on the counter with his fist. “What kind of idiot picked Chad? They didn’t need any missionaries in the bowels of Hell? Because I think that would have been a better place!”
“Dad,” Paisely sighs. “It’s not like you can just choose where to go. You’re matched based on your skill set and the needs of people all over the world. Plus, you wanted Henry to go to Kuwait to do that contractor stuff.”
“Henry is a man!” my father fumes, pointing to our little brother, who looks pretty un-mannish with Nutella on either side of his mouth. “Henry would be working with the armed forces around him, Paisley. Those are the people with the big guns. Not a bunch of peaceniks who want to sing Kumbayfuckingah when shit hits the fan!”
“The other side of the world.” Mom waves a hand in front of her face and her lips tremble. “Really? Is that what you’re thinking? Because there are children right here in America you could be helping, Paisley! People right over the bridge in New York City. Do you know the kind of parasites you can catch in a place like Chad?”
“Yeah!” Henry adds with boneheaded enthusiasm. “Did you see that Discovery Channel show where the guy had the tapeworm that was poking out of his arm? Like, he could see it trying to burrow out under his skin?”
Mom presses the heels of her hands to her eyes and moans before crossing herself and saying a Hail Mary.
Paisley glares at Henry, then reaches for Mom’s hands.
“Please listen, Mom, listen. It’s a whole group. The school we’re going to has been established for years. These people know what they’re doing, I swear. I’ll be just as safe as I would be here.”
My sister’s voice is frantic.
“...blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus...” Mom mutters.
Dad stomps to the door, puts a hand on the knob and announces, “This entire family has gone bat-shit crazy. My father warned me that you kids would be payback for all he’d had to put up with when I was a kid. But never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine I’d have kids like you!”
We each get a solid sneer before he slams the door, rattling the glass.
Mom is half-wailing now and has fled the room to find her rosary.
Paisley looks at me, her eyes filled with tears she’s so close to shedding. “Landry? Landry, do you think I’m an idiot for doing this?”
“No, Squirrely.” I put my arms around my sister’s shoulders and rock her back and forth while she cries hard. “Idiotic would be marrying Calvin or agreeing to incubate his demon spawn. What you’re doing is just kind of nutso. But good-hearted nutso.”
She pulls back and wipes the tears away with the back of her wrist. “Yeah?”
And I say the thing I’m always waiting for my parents to say to me, even though I’m an adult, and it shouldn’t fucking matter.
Because I’m a human, so it does kind of matter. It just does.
“Yeah, Squirrely. It’s good-hearted and brave. Brave as hell. And I’m proud of you. I’m proud that you’re leaving this little Podunk town behind and doing what you’re passionate about. And I feel like those little kids in Chad will be lucky to have someone as amazing as you there with them.”
Paisley knots her arms around my waist and squeezes until I’m sure she’s crushing vital organs. When she talks, her voice is all muffled in my shirt.
“Thank you, Landry. Thank you so much. I knew you’d understand. I knew you’d say what I needed to hear.”
Henry catches the last of her words.
“Hey, I was supportive, too.”
“You told me Calvin would probably get eaten by a lion and made me watch that parasite show with you,” Paisley accuses, her eyes narrowed.
Henry looks at me with a self-congratulatory