Jodi Picoult - House Rules

It isn’t the first time I’ve wrestled my brother into a coat and tie. “Jesus, Jacob, cut it out before you give me a black eye,” I mutter, holding his hands pinned over his head and straddling his body, which twists like a fish that’s suddenly found itself on a dock. My mother is working her hardest to make a knot in his tie, but Jacob’s thrashing so much that it’s practically a noose.

“Do you really need to button it?” I yell, but I doubt she can hear me. Jacob’s got us beat in sheer decibels. I bet the neighbors can hear him, and I wonder what they think. Probably that we’re sticking pins in his eyeballs.

My mother manages to fasten one of the tiny buttons on the oxford shirt collar before Jacob bites her hand. She makes a little squeak and jerks her fingers away from his neck, leaving one of the buttons still unfastened. “That’s good enough,” she says, just as Oliver arrives to pick us all up for the first day of the trial.

“I knocked,” he says, but obviously we wouldn’t have heard him downstairs.

“You’re early,” my mother answers. She is still wearing a bathrobe.

“Well, let’s see the finished product,” Oliver says, and my mom and I both step away from Jacob.

Oliver looks at him for one long moment. “What the hell is this?” he asks.

Okay, I’ll admit, Jacob’s not going to win any fashion awards, but he’s in a coat and tie, which were the criteria. He is wearing a polyester suit the color of an egg yolk that my mother found at a thrift store. A pale yellow shirt, with a stretchy golden knit tie.

“He looks like a pimp, ” Oliver says.

My mother presses her lips together. “It’s Yellow Wednesday.”

“I don’t care if it’s polka-dot Sunday,” Oliver says. “And neither does anyone on that jury. That’s the kind of suit Elton John wears to a gig, Emma, not what a defendant wears to trial.”

“It was a compromise,” my mother insists.

Oliver runs a hand down his face. “Didn’t we talk about a blue blazer?”

“Fridays are blue days,” Jacob says. “I’m wearing one then.”

“And coincidentally you are also wearing it today,” Oliver replies. He glances at me. “I want you to help me, while your mother goes and gets dressed.”

“But-”

“Emma, I don’t have time to fight with you right now,” Oliver tells her.

My mother is planning to wear a very simple dark gray skirt with a blue sweater. I was here when Oliver went through her entire closet channeling his inner Heidi Klum and picked out what he said would be “dark and conservative.”

Angry, my mother huffs out of Jacob’s room. I fold my arms. “I just got him into those clothes. No way I’m getting him out of them.”

Oliver shrugs. “Jacob, take that off.”

“Gladly,” Jacob explodes, and he rips the clothes off his own body in seconds flat.

Oliver tackles him. “Get the pin-striped shirt and the blazer and the red tie,” he orders, squinting into Jacob’s open closet. The second I do, Jacob takes one look at the clothing-styles he hates, plus they’re the wrong color-and lets out a bloodcurdling scream.

“Holy shit,” Oliver murmurs.

I reach for Jacob’s hands and pin them over his head again. “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” I say.

The last time I had to dress my brother in a coat and tie we were headed to my grandfather’s funeral. My mother was not herself that day, which is maybe why Jacob didn’t put up as big a fight about the clothes as he did today. Neither of us owned a coat and tie, so my mother had borrowed them from a neighbor’s husband. We were younger then, and a man’s jacket fit neither of us. We sat on the side of the viewing room where the coffin was with our clothes swimming on us, as if we’d been bigger before our grief hit.

In reality, I didn’t know my grandfather very well. He’d been in a nursing home since my grandmother died, and my mom dragged us to visit him twice a year. It smelled like pee, and I used to get totally creeped out by the old people in their wheelchairs, whose skin seemed stretched too shiny and tight over bony knuckles and knees. The one good memory I had of my grandfather involved sitting on his lap when I was really little and having him pull a quarter out of my ear. His breath smelled like whiskey, and his white hair, when I touched it, was stiff as a Brillo pad.

But still, he was dead, and I thought I should feel something…

because if I didn’t, that meant I was no better than Jacob.

My mother had, for the most part, left us to our own devices while she accepted the condolences of people whose names she didn’t even know. I sat next to Jacob, who was staring straight ahead at the casket. It was black and propped up on fancy sawhorses that were covered with red velvet drapes. “Jacob,” I whispered. “What do you think happens after?”

“After what?”

“After, you know. You die. Do you think you still get to go to heaven even if you never went to church?” I thought about this for a moment. “Do you think that you recognize people in heaven, or is it like moving to a new school and starting over?”

Jacob looked at me. “After you die, you decompose. Calliphoridae arrive on a body within minutes of death. The blowflies lay eggs in open wounds or natural orifices even before death, and their larvae hatch out in twenty-four hours. So even though maggots can’t live underground, the pupal cases might be buried alive with the corpse and do their work from inside the coffin.”

My jaw dropped.

“What?” Jacob challenged. “Did you really think embalming lasted forever?”

After that, I didn’t ask him any more questions.

Once Jacob has been forced into his new formal wear, I leave Oliver to deal with the fallout and go to my mother’s bedroom. She doesn’t answer when I knock, so I push the door open a little bit and peek inside. “In here,” she calls from her closet.

“Mom,” I say, and I sit down on her bed.

“Is Jacob dressed?” She pokes her head around the doorframe.

“Pretty much.” I pick at a thread on her quilt.

In all the years we have lived here, my mother has slept on the left side of the bed. You’d think by now she would have branched out and taken over the whole damn thing, but no. It’s like she’s still waiting for someone to crawl into the other side.

“Mom,” I repeat. “I have to talk to you.”

“Sure, baby. Shoot,” she says. And then, “Where the hell are my black heels?”

“It’s kind of important. It’s about Jacob.”

She steps out of the closet and sits down beside me on the bed. “Oh, Theo,” she sighs. “I’m scared, too.”

“It’s not that-”

“We’re going to do this the way we’ve done everything when it comes to Jacob,” she promises. “Together.”

She gives me a tight squeeze, which only makes me feel more miserable, because I know I’m not going to say what I want to say to her, what I need to say.

“How do I look?” she asks, drawing away from me.

For the first time, I notice what she’s wearing. Not the conservative skirt and blue sweater and pearls that Oliver picked out for her but instead, a totally out-of-season bright yellow sundress. She grins at me. “It’s Yellow Wednesday,” she says.

The first job from which I was fired was a pet store. I will not give the name of the chain, because I’m not sure if that’s printable, and I have enough legal trouble to last me a lifetime right now. However, I will say-objectively- that I was the best employee they had and that, in spite of this, they still dismissed me.

Even though when someone bought a corgi puppy, I offered facts along with Puppy Chow. (It’s related to the dachshund! Its name is Welsh and means dwarf dog!)