Alternative Version: What is the best advice you could give a younger sibling?

Carmen was quiet on the drive home.  Leanne knew the evening with her family hadn't gone well for her husband, who was tight-lipped through most of it, but she had finally been happy.  "What, Carmen?  What's the matter?"

"How can you let your brother treat you that way?"

Leanne was surprised not only by the statement, but by the heat.  "Treat me what way?"

Carmen's fingers were white on the steering wheel.  "He was mean to you."

She didn't mean to laugh, and clamped down on it quickly as she saw Carmen was serious.  "I'm sorry, Carmen, but I didn't notice."

"How could you not?  He laid hands on you."

"Yeah?  So?"

Carmen's mouth worked, but he was so astonished, he couldn't speak.

"Listen, Carmen.  You're an only child.  You don't understand."  Leanne was getting frustrated at her husband's unhelpful indignation.  She didn't want to have to defend her relationship, especially not to someone who didn't treat her family with respect.  Someone whose own family clamped down on their emotions, hiding their feelings and letting them burn for years.  Leanne always thought that Carmen being an only child had hurt him a lot.  She knew he thought having a younger brother had hurt her, but Carmen was wrong, as he so often was.

When Leanne finally left Carmen and filed for divorce, she knew his not understanding her relationship with her brother, or her whole family for that matter, was at the heart of their problems.

303

Escobar leaned back, the white leather of the couch creaking with his weight.  Sammy shifted from foot to foot, dabbing a handkerchief on his forehead.  "Jose," Escobar addressed one of his bodyguards without taking his eyes off Sammy, "what do you think we should do with this one?"  Jose smiled behind his mirrored sunglasses.  "What do you think?"  Esocobar and Jose laughed while Sammy's brain swirled for a way out.  Any way out.

256

"Christ Almighty, what are you doing?"  Janny stopped short in the doorway, disbelieving her eyes.  Harrol stood in the middle of his destruction, arms flexing and meaty fists still clenched around the leg of a table.  His eyes darted to Janny, silhouetted in the noonday sun, framed by the door, and her stomach clenched.

153

The monkeys were agitated again, and Chambers couldn't for the life of him figure out why.  It was a hot, humid evening.  Quiet.  Still.  Perhaps that was it--the stillness before a storm, though one hadn't been in the forecast.  Chambers would have welcomed the rain.  Shrill monkey screams broke the silence again, trees rustling.  What could have gotten into them?