flipflop_diva

They couldn’t have been more different. That’s what their mother used to say. And she would know. She was there through it all.

Jon had come first, born at 2:23 in the morning on a hot muggy July night. He came out pink and strong and wailing so loudly they could hear him down the hall.

James came ten minutes later, smaller than his brother, grayer than his brother, with a heart condition no one had detected. He was rushed to the NICU where he stayed for a month, hooked up to machines and fighting every day, while his brother went home to be cooed over by family members and friends.

Jon grew up to be the athletic one in a family that loved sports as much as they loved each other. He could run faster than all the neighborhood kids — even the ones years ahead of him in age. He rarely missed a basket when everyone gathered ’round for a fun game of hoops. And the strength in his arm ensured he would be quarterback for every football team he joined, from Pee Wee to the NFL.

James was not so lucky. He could barely run down the driveway without tripping over his shoelaces. The basketball hit his nose more often than it hit the basket. And football wasn’t even a question for a scrawny little kid who was small for his age, thanks to the heart condition he had been born with.

But Jon loved James, and James loved Jon, and the two of them played together every week for hours, and all the bruises and the scrapes and the broken bones didn’t stop James from making sure his brother was out there practicing. And when Jon threw the game-winning touchdown that brought their little high school the state championship for the first time in history, both boys knew that James had as big a role in their success as Jon did.

But as was maybe inevitable, things changed. Jon took a football scholarship to a large university and moved to the other side of the country. James stayed close to home and struggled to pass his courses at community college. Jon met a girl — a cheerleader — and married her in an elaborate wedding that everyone who was anyone attended. James met a girl and married her at the courthouse with just their parents in attendance.

Jon and his wife spent their money on big houses and elaborate vacations and nannies for the kids. James spent hours upon hours studying and working until he was accepted to medical school and became a pediatrician.

Jon and his wife divorced the year after he was let go from the NFL. He moved back to the town his brother still lived in, buying a huge house on the edge of town that no one but James ever came to see and watching money trickle away on things he didn’t need. James tried his best, but he could never get his brother to smile, not even through the jokes that James told and the childhood memorabilia that he brought with him.

“You can be happy again,” James told his brother. “You just have to try.”

And maybe Jon would have tried, after a while with his brother’s encouragement, but the twists of fate are cruel, and it was Jon who in the end was brought down by a heart condition that had maybe been there since he was born but no one had bothered to check.

James buried his brother on a Saturday morning, surrounded by the few people left who cared about Jon as much as he did. And then James went back home, to his wife and his children, to live the life he had always tried to live.

Thirty years later, when James was put to rest beside his brother, the church was overflowing with people trying to get inside to pay their respects to the man who always had a smile for everyone and who never gave up on anyone.

“He never stopped fighting,” his daughter said in her eulogy, “And that,” she continued, “made all the difference.”

fiction

Thank you for reading! This was written for Week 1 of the