Moodswing - My missing sister

Rumor has it my sister Cheryl made it back to Nicaragua. We don’t know for absolute certain, but my other sister Kim reports that Cheryl’s bank account shows there was a withdrawal last week from an ATM in Granada, and we figure it must have been made by our sister, since she is the only one who knows the PIN, and she wouldn’t give it out even if someone threatened to chop off her arms. We know this because that exact threat was made by the last person who tried to rob Cheryl. It was 18 years ago, and that man is still icing down his balls to this day.

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“Cher first paid a $2 fee to inquire about her balance,” Kim observed, “then she spent another $2 to make the withdrawal.” We found that funny because it was so in keeping with the fact that, no matter what her efforts are to keep from wasting money, Cheryl never fails to waste money. Take last month. It would have cost her $895 for a full-fare ticket to Alaska last month, but instead she paid $250 to fly standby. In the end, after reroute fees, hotel rooms for those nights stranded in strange cities on the way to her destination, two rental cars and one train ticket, she ended up spending close to $1,200 to get there and back. But that last leg of her trip, when she had to rent a car to get from Cincinnati to her final destination of Kim’s house in Dayton, the rental-car clerk, out of the goodness of his heart, upgraded Cheryl to a convertible Mustang at the last minute for no additional fee.

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“Yeeeeehaaaawww!” Cheryl hooted into her cell phone as she hurled down the freeway with the wind tossing her hot-pink-streaked hair into a tiny tornado above her head. “This car normally costs $150 a day! This makes it all worth it.”

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“You’re missing it,” Kim said, and tried to explain further about how it would have been cheaper if Cheryl had just paid the full ticket price. But by then Cheryl had accidentally tossed her cell phone onto the back floorboard while waving to a trucker. She arrived in Dayton an hour later, ready to roost herself in Kim’s life for a few more weeks before attempting to travel back to Central America, where we think she made it but we can’t be sure.

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“I missed my flight and I’m stuck in Atlanta,” her last phone message said. “I might make out tomorrow.”

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I suppose if anything serious is amiss we’ll hear about it, like if Cheryl really is missing, or if she finally killed her husband like she should, and most likely we’ll hear about it from Cheryl herself afterward, though Kim always complains that Cheryl never offers any details in her e-mail updates (“I’m leaving Wayne, see you Tuesday!”). But I consider these detail-free missives a definite plus. We don’t need to know why Cheryl left her husband, just that it was high time she did. Same for when she went back to him six months later.

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Kim, though, needs more details. She has always been that way ... wanting to know what was on the menu before we decided on a restaurant, what the terms were on the lease before we signed the rental agreement, what was in the syringe before the Guatemalan doctor injected us with it. She is so damn picky. I remember when we took our last family trip to Vegas that my mother had finagled through some time-share Ponzi schemers or something. All we kids had to do to qualify for free hotel rooms – not to mention cocktails – was sit through a three-hour sales presentation in the lobby. Kim was only 15, but still she questioned the equity of trading three hours of our time to be assaulted by high-pressure salesmen in exchange for a free hotel room when hotel rooms were going for just $25 that weekend anyway. “Not to mention that cocktails in Vegas are already free,” she pointed out.

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But Cheryl and I were too busy trying to suck down as many tequila sunrises as we could before we had to admit we were underage, at which point my brother became the main morsel of rotting meat for the vultures to peck. To this day he complains that that free hotel room cost him thousands of dollars in useless dues until the profiteering time-share company finally collapsed and couldn’t afford to pay its attorneys to extort money from its members anymore.

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But at least that tale lives on as part of our family history. My brother just retold it this past Thanksgiving, and we all laughed so hard I thought I was going to cough up all the crayons I ate in kindergarten. “It’s worth it just to have the memory,” he said.

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“No, you’re missing it,” Kim insisted. “It’s cheaper to just pay.” And she’s right. Once you factor in the time it takes to finagle, the stress of worrying it won’t work out and the credit-card charges you rack up once it inevitably doesn’t, it’s probably always cheaper to just pay. Cheryl, for one, is forever missing that part. She would likely be more mindful of missing it, I think, if she weren’t so busy hopping the globe, having the wind whip through her hair and driving down the highway in a surprise convertible Mustang while waving at truckers from the front seat.

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Hollis Gillespie is founder of the Shocking Real Life Writing Academy. www.hollisgillespie.com.