Big Little Bro Gets A Life & A Wife: Part II

Where was I?


Ah, yes... Big Little Bro and how he managed to procure a wife while living with us and sucking the life-blood out of our kindness.


So.

Bro had a few romantic encounters while on the road as a traveling insurance salesman (because what woman doesn't get wet over cancer insurance??).

Number One wasn't even anything close to a real romantic encounter, but I think it bears mentioning here because it will show you Bro's modus operandi.

I give you Number One, a girl I work with named Erika.

She's gorgeous.  While not quite supermodel svelte (read: could stand to lose fifteen pounds), I'd still give her an 8 out of 10 on a bad day. Unfortunately, Erika is an insecure, self-loathing head case who is absolutely convinced at all times that she's a 3 on a good day.

Bro saw a picture of Erika on my Facebook while sitting at the other end of the couch one day. "Oh, holy shit, who is this hot girl?!?"  I explained Erika to Bro.  "I don't care if you think she's a head case.  Is she single?  Set me up!"


Gahhhhh. *makes annoyed sound in back of throat*


He wouldn't listen.  But such is the war of the genders... a girl warns a guy that another woman is a total wackjob, and the guy concludes that the girl is just jealous of the wackjob's beauty.


Yes... yes, that must be it.

So at his request and against my better judgement, I mentioned to Erika that I had a cute brother living with me that wanted to meet her.  I had her attention.  "Ooooo!" she squealed excitedly, "Invite him out with us this weekend!"  I did.  A bunch of us all went out to a local club, and during the course of the evening I introduced Bro to Erika.

"Hey!" she purred, smiling at him from under her long dark eyelashes, and then proceeded to spend the rest of the evening alternating between flirting with Bro and lurking in the ladies' room on her cell phone having a heated, tearful, and increasingly drunk argument with her most recent ex, Kevin.


I looked at Bro and shrugged. "Sorry. I warned you," I mouthed to him across the loud table.

But he was not so easily dissuaded; this just made her more interesting.  The next day he said, "I want her number. Get her number for me, tell her I'd like to take her out for coffee or lunch or something."


What the fuck?  He was convinced that he could convince Erika to ditch the ex if she would just give him a chance.


Okay.  So I told Erika my brother really wanted her number and to take her out; and I dutifully relayed to him her reply that yes, she really wanted to go out with him, too!  But she just needed to clear up this whole mess with Kevin The Ex first.

Say no more, Erika.  I've totally got your number, even if Bro doesn't.

I'm no Yente (nerd alert: I love Fiddler on the Roof.  I may have just watched it yesterday for the 27th time).  I have no patience for this busybody shit, back and forth, trying to convince both parties that the other person is a total catch.  Nope.

I told Bro, "Look, forget Erika.  She's a semi-insane, game-playing, attention-craving drama queen.  Is that really who you want to try to date??"  Bro got tired of the games after a month and finally quit pursuing her.  (And of course, Erika started asking about him constantly the minute I stopped telling her that he wanted to go out with her.  But don't worry about her, she got over it eventually.  She's currently recuperating quite nicely from the fake boobies and liposuction she just bought herself, and will soon be back on the market as a 9.5 out of 10.  On a bad day.)

But rambling on.

Number Two was also a total bust.

I love this particular story.  I like to think of it as a classic redneck romance.

Number Two was the blindest of blind dates.


While working in North Carolina one week, Bro sold an insurance policy to some woman living on a country road out in BFE, who wheedled him into taking her daughter out after he complimented her on her lovely family upon seeing the family portrait in the living room.


Blink. Blinkety blink blink.


Yes.  You read that right.

How would you like to have that for a mother?  With the husband and grandmother nodding and smiling in agreement, this woman actually called her daughter with my brother sitting right there and said, "Oh, Hi Honey, this really cute guy stopped by this afternoon to sell me some insurance, and I think you should go out with him.  Here, just talk to him."

No, really.


That is really how it went down.


And this girl actually agreed to meet my brother at some bar for a drink.

Hello-o-o-o-ooooo!  Red flag, much?  What kind of a psychopathic woman sets her own daughter up with a complete stranger?  Never mind what kind of a lunatic girl agrees to meet up with some strange guy who know one knows from Adam?


It'd be safer to answer a fetish ad on Craigslist... at least then you'd know what you were getting into right off the bat.

They were all clearly idiots, but I mainly blame Bro.  He, unlike them, had not born in BFE to crazed redneck parents; he had at least been brought up with the decency to know better.

So Bro, with his, ahem, er... heart in the lead and his black hole of a brain in tow, went traipsing off to meet the hottie daughter for drinks.


They met at the bar and he bought her a few drinks.  He walked her to her car, where she pounced on him and ravaged him quite heavily in the parking lot (or so the story goes).


He then developed an obsessive crush on her, meeting up with her only once more during the course of a two week-long "relationship" based mostly on texting and Facebook.  When it all just suddenly ended one day and she stopped returning his calls (and blocked him on Facebook), he then moped around heart-brokenly for weeks.


"I thought we hit it off great!" he'd say in bewilderment.  "What went wrong?  She seemed really into me!" (Whores are generally into things with two legs and a penis, Bro.)  "Maybe her Grandma died?  She's probably just really busy at work, she works really long hours." (The only people who work hours that long are pole dancers and prostitutes, Bro.)  "I think I'll give it two more days and then call her one last time.  What do you think, Sis?  Call her one more time, or not?  Is two days too long, do you think?"


No, I'm not making this conversation up.


*Sigh*

I kindly and gently told him, "Get a clue, dude.  She's a ho and you're acting like a pathetic semi-stalker right now."

Mercifully, a few weeks after the Blind Date Ho fell off Bro's radar, another woman who lived in the same town purchased an insurance policy from him.  Ho's mother was mentioned by this woman, and when Bro told her that he had gone out with the Ho a few times and it had ended badly, the woman confided in him that Ho and her female family members were just a bunch of redneck, inbred sluts with a notorious reputation around town.


It was finally confirmed by someone whose opinion mattered (I'm a sister, I don't actually count when it comes to opinions):  Ho was, indeed, a Ho.


So he gave up again.


Number Three was almost as bad. I'll spare you the details.

Poor Bro.

He seriously can't catch a break with the ladies.  He's always looking for Mrs. Right in every cute girl he sees behind a department store counter or sitting by herself at Starbucks.  Every girl is a potential damsel in distress, and he's the knight in shining armor that she's been waiting for her whole life, whether she knows it or not.


A true romantic with no common sense is a recipe for disaster, and I've been on the listening end of every single one of these train-wreck relationships.


Have you forgotten the Nicole incident from two years ago?  And then there was Lydia, the super-cute blond hairdresser he fell in love with last year.  He sent her flowers between haircuts, and swore every week that this was going to be the week she broke up with her boyfriend to go out with him.


He's not a stalker, he's just Puppy Love to the max.

It was no huge surprise then this past February when Bro came home from a weekend business conference in Tennessee and told me,  "I met the hottest girl this weekend."  Oh, great... we just recovered from the Blind Date Ho.

This story started out just like all the rest.

She had also been attending the business conference.  She was super hot.  Way too hot to talk to, of course, but that didn't stop him from obsessively over-analyzing the way she'd said "hello" to him. Omigod omigod omigod, I thought, I'd rather get punched in the face repeatedly than listen to this shit all over again.

To my relief, she was only brought up sporadically about 3 times a week or so.  This was mostly because she lived in Colorado and thus could only be worshiped from afar.  Even then, Bro told me, "She doesn't date people in the company." Hmmmmmm.  Smart girl, to not eat where she shits.  However, he still continued to talk about Kia on a regular basis.

One day, Bro came home from work and informed me that the company wanted to fly him to Wyoming for a week to job-shadow and sell with one of the top salesmen in the country.  He told me excitedly that Kia only lived about 2 hours from where he'd be staying, and that he was going to get up the nerve to ask her on a date.

I seriously doubted whether his recently wounded ego or my frazzled nerves could stand many more romantic disappointments.

"Don't be too disappointed if she says 'No'... remember, you said she doesn't date co-workers," I reminded him.


Yes, I'm a Grinch with no soul, I know.  I just couldn't stand to keep watching the spiraling plane crash that seemed to be his love life lately.


Bro flew to Wyoming for a week.


By Thursday, he had worked up the nerve to ask Kia out for Saturday night.  He called me Thursday night, ecstatic.  "She said 'Yes!"  The truth came out five minutes later.  What she'd actually said was,  "Well... I'd like to, but we'll have to see... I have a 20-mile run on Saturday afternoon.  So sure, as long as I'm feeling up to it after that."


Sidebar rant: What ever happened to the good old "I have to wash my hair tonight" excuse??  When did shit get so complicated that girls now have to make up a 20-mile run as a reason to blow a guy off for a date?


As it turns out, she wasn't making it up.  She was actually training for a marathon.


*looks sideways rather sheepishly*


How was I supposed to know??


Anyways, they did go out.


And clearly you're all not stupid, and have figured out that she ends up being The One.


But to hear about how I spent all summer waiting for their shit to blow up in both of their crazy faces.....


You'll just have to wait for Part III.