He raised his beer. I raised my sweet tea. We didn’t clink. We just sat there, two completely different people from two completely different worlds, watching the same stars.
Aunt Patty, who had just driven four hours through Atlanta traffic, looked like she was considering using those discrete units to commit a felony. My Only Bitchy Cousin Is a Yankee-Type Guy- The...
My uncle laughed. My grandmother handed him a towel and said, “You needed to cool off, honey.” He raised his beer
Bradley refused to swim because the lake had “fecal coliform counts.” He wouldn’t eat the fried catfish because it was “unnecessarily greasy.” And when I finally got him to sit on the dock with his feet in the water— just his feet —he looked at me and said, with the gravity of a Supreme Court justice, “You know, your accent makes you sound like you have a learning disability.” We just sat there, two completely different people
His name is Bradley, but I’ve called him “Bratley” in my head since we were nine. He’s my only cousin on my mother’s side—my only cousin, period—and he is a Yankee-Type Guy. Not just a guy from the North, mind you. He’s the stereotype . The one who thinks sweet tea is an abomination, that “bless your heart” is a declaration of war, and that any temperature above 72 degrees is a personal insult from God.
I finally snapped at the Christmas Eve dinner when I was seventeen. Bradley had just finished a five-minute monologue about how Southern barbecue was “conceptually inferior to a properly smoked brisket from Kansas City.” He said “conceptually inferior” about my daddy’s pulled pork. My daddy, who had been up since 4 a.m. tending the smoker.
“Your oregano is expired,” he announced on his first visit, holding the jar like it was a dead rat. “And the way you store your olive oil next to the stove is degrading the polyphenols.”
