>>104131147The phone rang again for the fifth time, and retired Master Sergeant Linus Van Pelt finally had enough. He knew the number, knew it meant nothing but pain, but his wife was trying to sleep, so he trudged out into the cold of the winter night so not to wake her...
"What the fuck do you want?" he snarled.
"...she's dead." his mother said softly.
"And?"
There was a pause. "Your sister is *dead*."
"*And*?"
"For God's sake, Linus, I know she was hard to get along with, but she-"
"Listen, if you want to keep making excuses for her, fine. But I'm not going to cry for her. Not after all the shit she did to me, to my brother, to Charlie..."
"Honey, she had issues-"
"Well so do I! I came home to a fucking warzone that makes Afghanistan look nice every day when I was a kid, having to deal with her bullshit, do her chores, patch Rerun up when she tried to kill him-"
"Honey that was only once-"
"Oh you're right. You're absolutely right. She only tried to kill him over eating the last oreo ONCE. My bad. That's totally understandable. Listen, I need to go."
"Aren't you at least coming to the funeral?"
He could explain that after no one in his family showed up for his army graduation, or to meet him at the airport, or to be at his side when he recovered from a gunshot wound, that he felt absolutely no obligation to watch them dump her fat ass in the ground... but it was late, he was tired, and if they couldn't figure it out, that was on them.
He clicked the call off, started to turn off his cell, then he remembered a promise.
He fired off a text to Charlie. "The bitch is dead. Just FYI."
Then he turned off his cellphone and went back inside to engage in his favorite pastime- snuggling against the woman of his dreams.
