Stealing Drugs From Daddy

(For the purposes of anonymity, I will not mention which of my brothers this story relates to. Mind you, anyone who knows my family will figure it out pretty quickly.)

I ran into my sister Meghan while walking my dogs.

"Did you hear what our brother did now?" she asked me.

"No, what?"

And she told me most of the details of the following story.

My father is retired and has problems with his hips. One was replaced, but now the other hip is starting to go. When my mother got a job in a flower shop, my father was extremely jealous and asked me to write up his CV for him so he could find work too.

"Put something in there about my hip," he said, "so they know I can't walk a lot."

Being a good writer, I did no such thing.

Dad's doctor gave him some Tylenol 3s and other painkillers to help cope. My brother went over to visit, saw the pills sitting on the kitchen table, and asked if he could have some.

"If you take five Tylenol 3s at once, you get an amazing buzz!" he said to my dad.

My father was oddly reasonable (for him) and said, "No, you can't have any."

The next day my father goes out. When he comes home, all his painkillers are gone. Who could it have been? A mystery, for sure. My brother has never been particularly wise when it comes to sneakiness. He drops clues as obvious as cinderblocks everywhere he goes.

So my father calls my brother and gets the answering machine. Dad says, "You return my pills right now or you are barred from this house forever!"

This particular brother is a little irrational. He once justified snooping through a sibling's computer by saying that our family has no sense of privacy. So it's okay to just rifle through drawers, steal CDs, look through computer files, etc. Because we're not like other families. We're open and honest about everything. Supposedly.

Yesterday, my brother was online, and Michelle (my female companion) asked him if he'd stolen my dad's pills.

My brother said, "Yes." And then went on to say that he doesn't quite understand my father's punishment. "Now he doesn't call me all the time."

I can relate. The last time I spoke to my father was last father's day -- when I accidentally bumped into him as he was leaving my sister's place. Michelle whispered that I should go over and say happy father's day. Instead, I politely said hello to him, and then took off.