My brother

Alice’s phone rang at 4:30 in the afternoon, just as she and Edward were sitting down for tea and scones. Gertrude walked into the room, the noise of her housekeeper’s shoes echoing all the way up to the third floor. “We have Mr. Marcus ringing on the line.”

Edward, who’d already made himself comfortable in his leather chair by the fireplace, took his pipe out of his mouth and sighed. “Oh, Gertrude, not when we’re having our tea, please.”

Alice turned to him, “He’s my brother, Edward, I won’t be a moment.”

Alice walked across the hall with Gertrude, who disappeared into the kitchen to oversee the other servants preparing dinner. Tonight would be beef bourgignon with hollandaise asparagus.

Marcus seemed to call everyday with one trouble or another. Last week, it’d been his car accident in the Austin Healey. Monday, it’d been from the hospital, where he’d been taken after a Sunday night barroom brawl. What would it be today? It was only Thursday. He hadn’t yet made it to the weekend.

She reached the phone. Something in Alice told her to hang up the receiver and walk back to Edward and their starchy existence – but a little voice inside of her said, Go ahead, pick up the receiver. You know this is your real life. You know this is where you’d rather be.

“Marcus,” she said into the receiver. “This is Alice.”

She heard desperate crying. “Alice,” he said between sobs, “Jane has thrown me out of the house, and this time I think she might really mean it. May I come stay with you and Edward? Please, darling. I need you to hold me while I fall asleep, just like we did when we were young …”

Alice looked at the grandfather clock in the mirror’s reflection. Edward had inherited it from his grandmother.