Cormac was enjoying dinner with his family when the front door bell rang. His sister Amy stood on the front porch shivering in the 52 degree summer night air. “Good God, Amy, what happened to you?” Her hair was in a pulled apart, messy pony tail and her up-town girl make-up was smeared across her face in every which way.
“Corny, I’m sorry to come around here like this with the kids here and… well, I didn’t know where else to go.” She looked down to avoid the gaze of her got-his-shit-together older brother and his disapproving glare.
He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her into the house. As much as he disapproved of her lifestyle, he wasn’t going to leave his sister out in the cold. His wife fixed Amy a hot bath and a dinner plate while he and the kids put fresh sheets on the pull-out sofa bed in the living room. “Daddy, how comes you can haves a sleep over if you says I cannot?”
He patted his son on the head. “It’s not a sleep over, Corn-on-the-cob, she’s my sister. And your sister can sleep over any time she wants.”
There was another ring at the door. This time a tall, pale young man stood with his hands in his pockets pacing back and forth in front of the door. “Hiya, sorry, is Amy here?” he asked politely in an old Irish accent. “I, ah, I was trying to apologize to her when she ran off… I think she might be a little drunk. That could be my fault actually.”
Cormac stared at the stranger, trying to hold back his anger in front of the kids. He could feel his temperature and heart rate rise. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing… oh Nothing!” he took his hands out of his pockets and put them up in defense. “There was a friend of hers that I, well, I was trying to apologize for it all. I’m… I’m sorry. I can’t always control…”
Before the guy on his porch could finish, Cormac stepped out onto the porch and shut the door firmly behind him. He didn’t even feel himself wind the punch. The fist to face feeling was instantly satisfying. He closed the door before the tall Irish guy could pick himself up off the bottom step of the porch.
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