To Protect the Guilty

Family, Gin once said, is not what you should be worrying about.  She never got around to telling me just what that ought to be.  Probably because she was a poet.  Liked to leave things half incomplete.  I wish she hadn’t been like that, or at least not in my mailbox.  Why the hell she had the Home send all that stuff to me.  They’ve been saying she has been round the bend for months now, but every time Mama and I pick her up and take her in to town to the heart clinic she’s been clear as Mama.

I have been trying lately to put together all the things that I know about my Aunt Gin. Sis.   Virginia.  Ginny.

For starters:  she isn’t my aunt at all, not really.  Her sister is married to my daddy’s youngest brother.  And a more useless pair you would be hard pressed to find.  Look.  I am not one of those sorts who pretends to be all goodness and light, then turns the other direction and spits venom.  I mean what I say:  Carl and Shelia are not worth a dime together.

Aunt Gin is something else.  She is a lot older than Shelia.  Her mother’s first baby, and always sick with something or other.  Shelia is the youngest, after a long dry spell, at that.  The family miracle child.  The family beauty.  She is a witch and I am not going to talk about her any more because it makes me feel like talking politics or religion to people with one eye.