My mother and her sister, Yoli, they were locked in a war from the goddamn cradle. A quiet, undeclared, and completely lifelong death match fought with Tupperware parties, competitive Christmas cards, and the subtle, beautiful art of the backhanded compliment. My mother, bless her chaotic, beautiful, fucked-up heart, she was always playing catch-up, always trying to replicate Yoli’s quiet, respectable, and completely fraudulent version of the American Dream.
And Yoli, unchecked, just got… worse. More brazen. The manipulations got sharper, the lies got smoother, the quiet, backstabbing snickering became her native goddamn tongue. She was a conductor, orchestrating little symphonies of misery, conspiring, always conspiring.
She called me one day, back when I was living the high life in Bend, Oregon, playing the part of the successful prodigal son. And she had a proposition. A quiet, simple, and completely crooked little piece of business. Would I accept some money from my grandmother’s estate into my account, just for a few days, and then transfer it back? Just a little paper trail shuffle, she said, to make it look legit while they prepared Grandma’s finances for the final act of the American Dream: the complete liquidation of your assets so you can qualify for a Medicaid bed in some piss-smelling nursing home.
It was her mother, her problem. But I was the good nephew, the successful one. So I obliged. “Sure, Aunt Yoli,” I said. “Not a problem.”
And then, of course, the money went into her account. And I started hearing the whispers. How she was getting paid for her time “taking care” of her mother. How this whole goddamn end-of-life drama was part of their retirement plan. How Grandma’s house, Grandma’s money, it was all just pieces on Yoli’s quiet, respectable, and completely ruthless chessboard.
Now, I didn’t love my own mother in the traditional, greeting-card sense of the word. But she was still my mother. And I remembered how Yoli had burned her before, over Uncle Brown’s estate, over Grandpa’s scraps. And now here she was again, the executor, the trustee, holding all the goddamn cards, ready to deal herself the winning hand. And eventually, she did. It all went to her. Every last crumb.
And that, right there, that quiet, predictable, and completely disgusting act of greed, it just broke something in me.
Then came Grandma’s funeral. And I, the grandson who was probably closer to the old woman than any of them, I wasn’t invited to speak. Wasn’t asked to give a eulogy. Wasn’t even acknowledged. A quiet, deliberate, and completely chickenshit little slap in the face. So I didn’t even go to their phony goddamn memorial service. I already had my relationship with my grandmother. Everything else was just showboating, a beautiful, teary-eyed performance for the cheap seats while they pocketed the inheritance.
And all the while, another beautiful, ugly little drama was playing out behind the scenes. My ex-wife, Cindy, the star of her own goddamn tragedy, she was sending letters. To my father. To Aunt Yoli. Letters full of court documents, highlighted passages, quiet, poisonous little whispers. Look what your son has done. Look how bad he is. This is the real Jimmy. A beautiful, coordinated attack on multiple fronts.
So when I finally announced the divorce, the response from that side of the family wasn’t sadness. It wasn’t concern. No. It was… relief? Happiness, almost. You could hear it in their voices, that quiet, satisfied little purr. The golden boy, Mr. Perfect, the one with the big house in Bend and the beautiful blonde wife and the little Aryan kids… he’d finally tripped. He’d finally fallen on his goddamn face. Now look at him. He’s a failure. Just like us.
And that, right there, that quiet, ugly, and beautiful little moment of schadenfreude? That was the last goddamn straw. That was the last time I ever spoke to my Aunt Yoli. I was so disgusted by the whole rotten, beautiful, fucked-up spectacle of it all, that I just… hung up. Never called her again. She never called me. A mutual, quiet, and completely necessary disconnect.
And the whole tribe, the whole Utico clan, it just sort of… dissolved after that. My cousin Tina, Yoli’s daughter, she’d married into the Gomez family, a beautiful, sprawling, and completely overwhelming Catholic dynasty. Eleven kids, each with five or six kids of their own. Family get-togethers became a goddamn locust swarm. Thirty Gomezes milling around, speaking Spanish, and three quiet, bewildered Uticos hiding in the corner, feeling like tourists in our own goddamn family. The nontraditionals, the gringos, the quiet weirdos like me and my brother, we just got squeezed out. Lost touch.
I see Tina sometimes. Sit down with her husband. And you find out, of course, that their perfect, respectable marriage is the same quiet, simmering shithole mine was. Separate rooms. Affairs on business trips. The whole beautiful, ugly, and completely predictable script. “How are you still here?” I asked him once. “For the kids,” he said, with that quiet, martyred sigh. “It’s a sacrifice. It’s what we’re expected to do.” Just like Uncle Vic, hiding out in the factory, doing his time, living a quiet, respectable, and completely castrated life.
It was all an illusion. The whole goddamn thing. Tina eventually got divorced. Yoli eventually got old and alone, shipped off somewhere. The grandkids scattered. The Gomez dynasty probably imploded under its own weight. It’s just a crazy shitshow, this life. I think about reaching out sometimes, maybe sending a drunken, misspelled text message like I did once before. But then I think, what’s the point? They’re just reminders of a beautiful, ugly, and completely toxic past. And I’m probably the same damn thing to them. We both need a fresh start. (But yeah, if they called needing a grand, unlike my own cheap-ass organic father, I’d probably send it. Probably.)
It was all built on lies anyway. Nobody was telling the truth. You had to read between the lines, and even then, they’d deny it.
And the other cousin, Yvette? The one who used to puke on the side of the road on the way to Yuma? She turned into some boring, cult-crazy, Christian whack-job, living up in Idaho, probably polishing her guns and waiting for the Rapture. Beautiful woman, looked like Wonder Woman, but you couldn’t get within twenty feet of her without feeling judged by her quiet, hateful, and completely certain little god. Found herself a man just like her daddy, a quiet, respectable ghost to build her cage around.
So that’s the Utico side. Or what’s left of it. Which is nothing. Because there were no boys. Grandpa Johnny had two daughters. Yoli had two daughters. The girls all took their husbands’ names. The Utico name, that whole branch of the family tree? It’s dead. Finito. A quiet, final, and completely fitting end to a line that maybe produced one too many beautiful, ugly monsters. Just like everything else, it just… ended. A quiet, unremarkable extinction.
