My Only Bitchy Cousin Is A: Yankee-type Guy- The...

My grandmother just smiled and said, “Well, bless his heart. He gets that from his father’s side.”

Bradley refused to swim because the lake had “fecal coliform counts.” He wouldn’t eat the fried catfish because it was “unnecessarily greasy.” And when I finally got him to sit on the dock with his feet in the water— just his feet —he looked at me and said, with the gravity of a Supreme Court justice, “You know, your accent makes you sound like you have a learning disability.”

He shrieked—a high, pure sound like a teakettle—and flailed in the murky water for a full thirty seconds before realizing he was standing in three feet of it. He marched up the boat ramp, dripping wet, khaki shorts now translucent, and announced to the entire family that I was “a menace to civilized society.” My Only Bitchy Cousin Is a Yankee-Type Guy- The...

Aunt Patty, who had just driven four hours through Atlanta traffic, looked like she was considering using those discrete units to commit a felony.

He raised one perfect eyebrow. “Yes?” My grandmother just smiled and said, “Well, bless

“I know,” I said, sitting down next to him. “You’re a terrible liar.”

That was Bradley. He never learned to cool off. He just got sharper. He raised one perfect eyebrow

My uncle laughed. My grandmother handed him a towel and said, “You needed to cool off, honey.”

I pushed him off the dock.

By high school, he was six feet tall, razor-thin, and had developed a vocabulary specifically designed to make you feel like a piece of lint on his blazer. He went to a boarding school in Connecticut where they apparently taught Latin, crew, and the fine art of condescension. I went to public school in Macon, where I learned how to hotwire a golf cart and make a bong out of a Gatorade bottle. We had nothing to say to each other.

He still corrects my grammar. I still threaten to push him off the dock. But now when he says “It’s ‘fewer’ not ‘less,’” I say, “Bless your heart, Bradley.” And for some reason, that’s become the nicest thing either of us knows how to say.