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4 king of the Losers My sister and her boyfriend have two kids, girls, ages four and one. The kids are total sweethearts and the big one is wicked smart and can read already. My sister is wicked smart too but she has major mental thunderstorms and the social service has come three times to check on the kids. The boyfriend is messed up too but his problem is simply that he is the biggest loser ever. The best job he ever had was delivering pizza which lasted two whole days before they fired him and docked all his pay, which tells you all you need to know. His job these days as far as I can tell is stealing money from countertops and mailboxes. My other sister and I used to leave dollar bills on the kitchen counter and bet how fast he would palm them. His all-time record was nineteen seconds. If there really was a God this guy would be working in a prison laundry but there’s clearly no God or not much of one because my sister is always talking how much she loves the guy but we see him for what he is, which is king of the losers. I would beat him up but what’s the point? My sister would just fawn over the bruises and he would be so mortified that a teenager hammered him that he would be even meaner to his kids, and I love those kids. Anyway the point of my story is the fourth time the social services came to their house, which is a total pit. My sister isn’t capable of maintaining the house and the loser is too lazy. They don’t pay Brian Doyle | 5 rent or anything on the house. The loser got it from his uncle as a tax dodge. For a long time my mom and dad and other sister and I would go over on the weekends and clean up just to keep the kids from living in filth but my dad quit going over because he always ends up crying or my sister screaming at him and my mom is all busy with the courts trying to get custody of the kids, and my other sister moved away and got a crewcut and changed her name, so I am the only one going over there lately. So the other day I drive over to clean the bathroom and kitchen, which are the absolute crucial places to clean, but when I get there the social service truck is parked in front of the house and I get the willies, because three times is the limit for social service and the fourth time is business. I can hear the loser yelling and my sister hysterical, so I go around back and find the girls on the swings, the big one pushing the little one. I ask them how long the social service has been here and the older one says like only two minutes because she and her sister just came out and she remembered to buckle the baby into the swing like I showed her. I say that is excellent baby management and they can swing for exactly one minute while I check the score, and I lean in the back door and hear the calm reasonable voices of the social service and the loser yelling that they are his kids dammit and this is fascism and where’s the warrant and he knows his rights and this is a police state and etc. I listen for my sister but now I don’t hear her at all, which is a bad sign; when she’s really flipped out she shuts down all systems and erects deflector shields and rocks herself in the closet. So I realize this is doomsday, social service has come to take the kids, and while I totally support the idea of social service, and how the state is responsible for children from untenable homes, I also know these are sort of my kids too, so I gather up the girls and we cut across the neighbors’ yards and slip into my car like secret agent spies, me carrying the baby like a football which she thinks is funny, and we drive away very quietly and go five towns before we stop and get some fries and try to think this puppy through. [3.136.97.64] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 03:52...

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