All in the Family

All in the Family

By Ed Staskus

   Matas Poska twisted around in his seat, glaring at and swatting his brother’s hand off his shoulder. “Keep your hands off me” he said. “Who the hell do you think you are? You touch me again, there’s going to be trouble.” He couldn’t have been more to the point, although he didn’t necessarily want there to be a fight. He wanted his brother, however, to know exactly how he felt. Matas hadn’t trusted him for a long time and now disliked him on top of it. He knew that having finally sold their mother Agne’s house, and push coming to shove, they would soon not be seeing much of one another. The sooner the better, he thought.

   “Call me Ray,” Raimondas said, extending a warm salesman’s smile and a firm handshake to the attorney on the other side of the big desk. Ray’s new teeth glistened like Chiclets. His thinning hair was combed straight back.

   “You’ve got a nice tan for this time of year,” the attorney said. His hair was streaked with gray, his skin was grayish, and he was wearing a dark gray suit. A blizzard was blowing in from Lake Erie. The attorney’s back was to the window. Matas glanced through the window at snowflakes swirling in the icy-cold wind.

   “The wife and I just got back from two weeks in Jamaica,” Ray said. “We had a great time, great place.”

   “How’s the new car?” Ruta asked, shooting a venomous glance at her brother.

   “Couldn’t be better, drives like a charm, no problems.”

   Their mother Agne’s problems began a day after her husband died. She lost her appetite and couldn’t sleep. They had been married for 64 years. They met in Germany in a refugee camp after World War Two. They met again after both of them emigrated to the same small mining town in Canada. There had been no future for them in Europe. There were good-paying jobs in the Sudbury Basin. They got married in 1949 and were able to get into the United States in the late 1950s. It was where they raised their three children. They had been hard-working and give or take happy.

   She fell down in the kitchen in the middle of the night two years after her husband died. She had been thirsty and looking for Gatorade in the fridge. She fractured her right leg and lay on the ceramic tile floor until Ruta found her in the morning. Agne spent ten days at the Cleveland Clinic in Avon, two weeks recuperating at the Welsh Home in Rocky River, and a month of physical therapy at home.

   A year later she was back on her feet. She and Ruta visited relations in Toronto. Agne drove some of the way there and back on the New York Thruway. But the next year she had a mini-stroke and never drove again. Ray’s son Tyler convinced her to give up her Ford Taurus, telling her it was risky to be on the road. “You shouldn’t be driving,” Ray piped in. She signed it over to Tyler, but lamented seeing it gone. The car had represented independence, whether she drove it or not.  After it was gone she rarely left the house.

   Tyler immediately sold the Ford Taurus, even though it was more new than not. He leased a Toyota 4Runner. “This is more like it, not like that granny mobile,” he told his girlfriend. She didn’t like it when he told her to keep her dog out of the SUV, especially when he called her dog a mutt.

   When Agne caught Covid-19 she spent three weeks at the Cleveland Clinic in Avon. She was never the same after she returned home. She had been in good health all her life, having grown up on a farm in Lithuania, but she was in her 90s. She craved salt, even though she had high blood pressure, and Ray indulged her.

   “Stop bringing her those salted nuts,” Matas told his brother every time he saw a bowl of them. “Are you trying to kill her?” He was exasperated. He threw the nuts away, but they always came back, along with bags of chocolate treats and bottles of Gatorade.

   When she died the cause of death was listed as natural causes. Her last week was spent conversing with ghosts during her wakeful hours and lost in dreams the rest of the time. Broken mirrors littered her dreams. The real world no longer meant anything to her. Her greatest desire was to join her husband. Her last day was spent shutting down. She was tired and died of old age.

   The two brothers and Ruta were in Saul Ammon’s legal office in the Marlowe Building on Detroit Ave. in downtown Lakewood, Ohio. Matas and Ruta both lived in Lakewood. Their mother had lived further west in well-heeled Rocky River. Their brother Ray lived in a new development in Sheffield Lake, even further west. They had sold their mother’s house, but Ray hadn’t lived up to their mother’s will. He had given Matas and Ruta half of what the will spelled out. He told them he was the trustee and had power of attorney and was doing what he thought best.

   “You mean best for you, like stealing all of mom’s savings and CD’s,” Ruta said. She was seething.

   Ray shrugged it off like it was something everybody did. Greed is more gullible and self-seeking than innocence. He was never going to give his siblings access to their mother’s financial records. He wasn’t going to give them any part of the nearly two hundred thousand dollars he had realized in the past two years. He wanted it to be understood he had his reasons, but he wasn’t going to talk about them. They didn’t need to know anything. He wanted everybody to know he was honest as the day was long. He didn’t want anybody to know that wherever he went there was an eclipse at least once a day.

   “Mom said she wanted to pay me for everything I was doing for her.”

   “You’re saying she paid you so much in two years that on the day she passed away she had less than nine thousand dollars left in the bank,” Ruta said. “She wasn’t a fool and I’m not a fool, either. Where are all her savings? If she hadn’t died she would have found out she was a pauper. How was she going to pay her bills?”

   “I have to take care of Tyler.”

   Tyler was a part-time drug dealer and a full-time party boy. He wasn’t able to stay out of jail or hold down a steady job. He had been fired from one job after another for lack of effort. Ray had been paying his son’s rent and bills for almost a year.

   “I took care of mom 24/7,” Ray said.

   “You are a liar,” Ruta said. “I was at her house every day. When she broke her leg I lived with her for a month. When she got a stroke I lived with her for another month. When she got the Covid I lived with her again. All I ever saw you do was run in, make her the same ham and cheese sandwich day after day, make sure she had taken her medications, and run out. You never stayed more than 10 or 15 minutes.”

   “How about all the times I took her to see doctors?”

   “I took her most of the time.”

   “I did everything for mom but nobody appreciates it. Matas didn’t do anything.”

   “Let’s stop arguing and get down to business,” Matas said. “I’m not going to go after you for what you did with mom’s Third Federal accounts. Our lawyer has told us it would be costly and time consuming. I don’t want it preying on me for however many years it might take.”

   Ruta didn’t say anything. Matas had asked her to sit tight until they wrapped up getting their share of the proceeds from the sale of their mother’s house. She had agreed, although she hadn’t told Matas she had talked to the Lakewood Law Department about elder abuse. She was going to someday make Ray pay for what he had done.

   Ray was a problem and had been since his twenties. In his late 20s, when he was working for a suburban community college, he fell deep in debt to a bookie who worked out of a back table at the Mentor Diner. Day after day none of his horses paid off. His bookie kept a strict ledger and got impatient. When Ray got married to a rich girl from Columbus their wedding reception was a gala. At the end of the day they had collected nearly forty two thousand dollars. Ray paid his bookie the thirty nine thousand dollars he owed him but neglected to tell his wife about it. When she started shopping for a house, planning the down payment, he had to spill the beans. They had been married fifty eight days on that day. She left him on the fifty ninth day and went home to Columbus. He never saw her again. The divorce was certified by mail.

   He dated several women after that, each one of them breaking it off with him after a year-or-so. He finally married a Jayne Mansfield with a family, who were two children by two passing boyfriends. Ray and Anita had a third child, who was Tyler. Anita was a beautician and a part-time actress. She was also an alcoholic. Three years after they divorced she drank herself to death. Ray married a woman named Karen soon afterwards. They both believed greed was good and lived the good life together.

   Ray put his avarice to work when it dawned on him his mother had dementia and was dying. Her trustee had long been a nephew who had long worked for Jones Day, one of the biggest law firms in the United States. Ray’s wife had a nephew who was an ambulance chaser in Pittsburgh. He drew up new trustee paperwork. Agne signed the documents without knowing what she was signing. The ambulance chaser also drew up new power of attorney paperwork. Agne signed those documents, too. Ray became the trustee and got power of attorney into his hands at a stroke.

   He took the new power of attorney paperwork to a hair salon. Ray knew the manager from his marriage to Anita. He asked her to witness the document. She did, and so did a customer they asked, in return for a bottle of shampoo. Ray was pleased with his work that day, although he didn’t know his sister Ruta got her hair done at that same salon. One day, in passing, the manager told her about Ray and the documents. Ruta wrangled affidavits from her and the customer.

   “I have got two affidavits that swear you got their signatures on the power of attorney documents fraudulently,” Matas said. “They say mom was never present for them to witness her signature.”

   The lawyer pushed two affidavits across his big desk. Ray didn’t look at them. He looked at Matas.

   “What do you want?” he asked. 

   “You used your power of attorney to empty mom’s accounts at Third Federal but I don’t want to drive myself crazy about that,” Matas said. “What I want is, I want you to pay us the full amount that Ruta and I are due from the sale of the house, like it says in mom’s will.”

   “And if I don’t?”

   “If you don’t I will leave this office this afternoon and go file a criminal complaint with the Clerk of Court.” 

   “Can we make a deal?” Ray asked.

   “I’m not selling any alibis,” Matas said.

   “But I’m your brother.”

   “Save your breath to cool your soup.”

   “Let me think about it.”

   “No,” Matas said. “The banks are open. We’ll wait one hour. Bring certified checks. If you’re not back in an hour, I’ll go straight to City Hall.”

   “You know I didn’t do anything wrong,” Ray said, beside himself. “This is just a rip-off. I need that money. Tyler needs it, too. Karen might divorce me if she finds out, do you know that? Is that what you want? You want to see me homeless? The two of you, you’re both evil.”

   “Is that so?”

   Ray shot his brother a dirty look. He was the kind of mother’s son who got mad when you didn’t believe whatever he was saying. Ray believed everything he said, no matter what. He kept the black dogs hidden from himself. He couldn’t distinguish between truth and lies anymore and so he couldn’t distinguish between right and wrong anymore. To be on the safe side, whenever he caught himself telling the truth, with his next breath he reflexively told an untruth to keep his hand in. 

   It was a few minutes short of an hour when Ray returned and tossed two certified checks down on the lawyer’s big desk. Matas slid one over to his sister.

   “You know we’re never going to see each other again,” Ray said, aggrieved. Everybody’s got plans until you get hit in the face, he thought to himself bitterly.

   “That doesn’t make any difference anymore,” Matas said. “Go away and stay away.”

   “I can’t believe he would do that to mom,” Ruta said. “Everything about this is too bad, really bad, but he’s probably never going to change. He’ll just find another soft touch and blame everything on everybody else.”

   “At least the Joker has left the building,” Matas said.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

Help support these stories. $25 a year (7 cents a day). Contact [email protected] for details.

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn, New York City, 1956. Stickball in the streets and the Mob on the make. President Eisenhower on his way to Ebbets Field for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Reviews

[JayG]

First: Dump the pictures. If the words don't hook the reader no amount of glitter will change that. And this is a writer's venue, not a publication venue.

As for the story....

• Matas Poska twisted around in his seat, glaring at and swatting his brother’s hand off his shoulder. “Keep your hands off me” he said.

So...someone we know nothing about, who could be 10 or 100, who lives in an unknown place, told his brother not to touch him, for unknown reasons. From the view of the reader, who has zero context or interest, “Who cares?” Missing context isn’t a mystery, just a reason for rejection.

• He couldn’t have been more to the point, although he didn’t necessarily want there to be a fight.

So...we’ve learned that two people we know nothing about, in an unknown place for unstated reasons, were arguing about something unstated. And now, a narrator, someone whose voice contains only the emotion suggested by punctuation, steps on the stage to deliver a 58 word info-dump of gossip about their past, never clarifying their present. And as they do, the people living the story politely shut up, never asking who he is? Were someone to appear in my house and begin talking to unseen people I would, wouldn't you?

The mistake you make is in trying to tell the reader a story, when the reader expects you to make them feel they're living it, in real time.

Perhaps, were the reader to have context, they might care. But, were this a submission to an agent or publisher, here is where the rejection would come, because in the words of Dwight Swain:
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“To begin a story, you must create a story world.
You start with your reader’s mind a blank. Then, a step at a time, you lift him away from reality and transport him into the imaginary land you have conceived.
To travel thus into the story world, your reader instinctively asks three questions:

(1) Where am I?
(2) What’s up?
(3) Whose skin am I in?”
- - - - - -
Those three things provide context to make sense of what happens. They need to be addressed quickly on entering any scene. But you speak as though the reader already knows. So for you it works. For the reader? It’s, “Huh?”

• “Call me Ray,” Raimondas said, extending a warm salesman’s smile and a firm handshake to the attorney on the other side of the big desk.

So...without making it apparent to the reader, you abandon those two unknown people, and begin reporting what two other unknowns, who could be on another planet, and living at a different time, are saying?

I mean no insult, but I must ask: have you done any study of the structure of a story on the page?

And again, after your people speak a few meaningless pleasantries, which have no place in any story, you step on stage, silence them, and provide an endless info-dump of information the reader has not been made to want to know. No one cares about the history if fictional people. No one wants to study a fictional history. Readers want raw meat, action, and excitement. How exciting is it to learn that someone unknown objected to being touched by their brother?

Dwight Swain once had the editor of a male adventure magazine tell him: “Don’t give the reader a chance to breathe. Keep him on the edge of his God-damned chair all the way through! To hell with clues and smart dialog, and characterization. Don’t worry about corn. Give me pace and bang-bang. Make me breathless!”

Yes, it was a bit over the top, but still, as the great Alfred Hitchcock observed, “Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.” And, readers crave drama because their own life has too many dull bits.

What you’re doing, at present, is transcribing yourself storytelling, which cannot be made to work, and which is the most common trap for the hopeful writer, because for you, who begins reading with full context; begins with a visual image of the scene in your mind; begins with full backstory; who has intent for the meaning of each line; and who can both hear the emotion in the narrator’s voice and know the visual aspects of your performance, the story works.

For the reader? Unless the narrator’s words are “heard” as you would perform them, and the visual performance is in view, they have no more than a storyteller’s script, with no idea of how to perform it.

Bottom line: For hundreds of years, writers have been learning ways to please the reader and avoid the many traps. We call that body of knowledge and technique the Commercial Fiction Writing profession. Learn the skills of it and you avoid the traps and please the reader. Fail that, and you fall into the traps and never realize that you have.

There's no way around that and no shortcut. When reading fiction you see the result of using those skills but not the tools in use. And, since you began to read you’ve selected only writing that was created with those skills, and will reject, in less than a page, what wasn’t.

More to the point, your reader will, which is the best argument I know for acquiring them.

Try this: An excellent first book is Jack Bickham’s, Scene and Structure, which is available on, The Internet Archive.
https://archive.org/details/scenestructurejackbickham

And for an overview of the many traps, gotchas, and misunderstandings, you might try a few of my articles and videos.

Sorry my news isn’t better. But as I said, the traps are invisible, and for you the story works. Added to that it’s not a matter of talent. So, try a few chapters of that book for fit. It can make a HUGE difference.

Jay Greenstein
Articles: https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@jaygreenstein3334

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“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
~ E. L. Doctorow

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
~ Mark Twain

“In sum, if you want to improve your chances of publication, keep your story visible on stage and yourself mum.”
~ Sol Stein