I looked at the curl of paper, and put my hand on it, ready to throw it in the trash, unread. On the other hand, they had gone to an awful lot of trouble to get it to me.

I was ready to look at it when my phone rang. I answered it automatically, as my eyes tried to decipher the spidery letters. (I was always touched by Tolkein’s comparisons of handwriting in the Red Book of Westmarch (as opposed to the Red Book of D&D, because that version of Dungeons & Dragons came in a box set.) It was just a way of giving life to the journal as character.)

“Oh, it’s you.”

“You owe me a favour, dear, sweet, older brother.”

I couldn’t make heads or tails of the note while I fenced with my sister, so I stuffed it in my pocket. “I suppose I do. What will it be? Will I have to wear something pretty and frilly?” I tried to make my voice come out in an enthusiastic simper, like I was mincing across the floor in exaggeratedly insulting, flamboyant joy.

“Oh, would you?” she played it over-the-top. “Not that I’m trying to spoil your plans of picking up a few extra dollars down on Colfax,” she said, voice turning to a more serious tone. “I need you to check in on Mom.”

“I don’t owe you that much,” I grated.

“Pretty please, with pink sparkles and sugar on top?” she said, her voice as syrupy sweet as the description.

“What’s wrong with her now?” I knew I was whining. “No, wait, I don’t want the list. Fine, but all debts paid in full, I spend no more than twenty minutes before my hair catches fire or I get arrested or something real happens to get me off the phone, and if she asks me when you are going to settle down and have children I have carte blanche to answer in any way I so desire.”

“Twenty-five minutes and I can’t have sold my uterus on eBay,” she negotiated. “And your hair can’t catch fire, I think you used that in 2005.”

“No wonder it seemed so familiar. Done, and deal.” I was about to hang up when it occurred to me. “Why not on eBay?”

“Mom’s got this thing about body parts on eBay. I think she got a chain letter from Auntie A.”

“Since when did she unblock Auntie A?” I don’t know if every family has an Auntie A, who sends them only the Most Ridiculous chain e-mails about things that repeat the “Appeal to Emotion” logical fallacy. They certainly didn’t Appeal to Common Sense.

“When she went to a new provider. She sucks at setting up filters. Took me almost two hours on the phone with her last time.”

I grunted. Despite her seeming full-time search for a sugar daddy, my sister works for a small company that has her do tech support over the phone. She takes great pride in her resolution speeds. Privately, I’ve always thought she annoyed the customers and then set them up to keep them from ever being able to dial back.

Of course, it also meant she was flaunting two hours on the phone with Mom, and only asking me for less than half an hour. That was more subtle pressure that I had had from her in a while. She was upping the ante at the Game.

People play games with each other, and they feel out the rules. I don’t know that everyone, if asked to specify the rules, would agree on the actual guidelines and subtleties, but I know couples who score friendly points off of each other for all sorts of things, like saying a particular phrase or, of course, pun wars, or getting the final say (ever) or things like that. For my sister and I, well, I won’t say we ever play fair, but there are lines we don’t cross. That’s the important rule of these games: you know when the line’s been crossed, and you lose when it has.

“No time like the present,” I said. “Besides, I don’t like owing you.”

“Of course not. That’s why I get you to pay in pretty pennies,” she pointed out, cackling and hanging up.

I sometimes wondered if I would ever be able to bring a girl to meet my family. Well, if I liked her enough she’d have to be quick enough to handle them all, from Ed’s ma to my wicked sib.

I dialed from memory. The phone number hadn’t changed for over two decades, and, well, I didn’t want it programmed into my phone. This was probably one of those anti-senility games I played with myself. “If I can’t recognize the number quick enough to send it into voicemail, I deserve what I get.”

I won’t transcribe the ten minutes it took to convince her who it was on the phone, but the additional fifteen minutes went something like this.

“There I am, and I’m shouting because they’re not listening, but that’s fine because they really don’t know the language but I guess it’s their language because when you go down there’s it’s practically another country because all the billboards are in their language so you know you’re in southern Aztecistan where there’s condors on the street corners who will eat your heart out for extra prayer passes. Those are condors in the glyphs, right? So then you’re remembering your basic lessons but you don’t know that shouting, `I just wanted one of your long doughnuts’ isn’t going to come out something terribly naughty so you’re trying not to point because you read somewhere that pointing means different things in different cultures so you don’t want this young man thinking you’re trying to proposition him when all you’re starving and you can’t wave money to let him know you want to pay for his pastry because then they’ll see you’re carrying cash and it all goes bad from there. Oh, and on the pointing, did I tell you about Uncle Sergei? He almost lost a finger. He was poking it into a bird cage…”

I didn’t ask if it was the cage of a condor.

Ah, mom.