Round 1: Brennan

Dawn Brennan and her husband Liam Brennan are Adults. Their daughter Autumn Brennan is a Young Adult. Liam's brother Silas Brennan is an Adult.

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Dawn had been sad for so long she had forgotten what happy felt like.

Maybe it had started when she hadn’t been able to have another baby after Autumn as easily as she had expected. She had thought it would be simple. Autumn had been an accident, after all, born when Dawn and Liam were still in high school. They graduated, got married, and had been trying for a second baby ever since. Now Autumn was older than Dawn had been when Autumn was born.

Or maybe it had started when Liam had lost his job and they’d had to move into this tiny cramped house, away from the spacious place she had loved. Liam had become less pleasant as time stretched on without him finding a new job, too; he had always loved being at work, and resented no longer having that sense of purpose and direction.

Or maybe it was the feeling that had gradually grown in her over the past several years, the nagging sense of wasted potential. She had stayed home with Autumn at first, and even when Autumn was old enough to look after herself, she still hadn’t gotten a job. Liam had liked providing for the three of them, and, they reasoned, as soon as they had that second baby she would be home again anyway, so what was the point? But there was a part of her that wasn’t satisfied with the life she had led, that knew she could have risen far if only she’d had the chance. Of course, now that Liam had lost his job, they both regretted that she didn’t have a career for them to fall back on, although Liam would never admit it.

Then there was the fact that job and no money also meant they couldn’t afford the fertility treatments they had been talking about for years.

And of course, it didn’t help that Liam’s older brother had taken up seemingly permanent residence on their couch. In their old house, it wouldn’t have been a problem. But they’d had to move into a smaller place after Liam was laid off, and in this house there wasn’t even so much as a spare bedroom to tuck him away into. Silas was just… always there. When he wasn’t napping on the couch, he was criticizing the way Autumn cooked or how Liam knotted his tie or the fact that Autumn was out of high school and still hadn’t moved out. As if she had the money for that.

Recently Silas had started dating someone, a woman named Lacey who came around at all hours of the night. Sometimes she brought a kid with her, a daughter who would raid her refrigerator while Silas and Lacey did god-knows-what on the couch. There was something off about Lacey, Dawn thought, even though she couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was. Liam agreed.

Dawn asked Liam, one night, with Silas’s girlfriend laughing downstairs, if he thought they should give up on the baby. He, of course, told her that it wouldn’t be long now. That was what he had been saying since Autumn was born. Even after they had been married for so long, she still didn’t understand that optimism of his. Not just about this – about everything. He had also been insisting for the past year that he would find another job any day now.

Somewhere along the line, Dawn and Liam had started growing apart. Neither of them were sure how or when it had started. It had been before Liam lost his job. Even then, they had started to feel more like strangers than like husband and wife. But they had tried to ignore it. They were still trying to ignore it now.

Finally, after watching Liam’s fruitless job search go on for too long, Dawn started going on interviews herself. She found a job almost immediately. It was nothing much – a job in the mailroom of a local company – but it was something. It would help keep the household afloat, at any rate.

They had a huge argument when she told Liam. He claimed it was because she hadn’t said anything to him beforehand, and because, after all, she was going to be home again anyway as soon as the baby came. She knew what it was really about – that he had been searching for so long without finding anything, while for her it had happened almost effortlessly.

Autumn was aware of the growing tension between her parents, of course. But mostly she tried to ignore it and focus on her art. She had gotten a job at an art gallery in town, but what she really wanted was to sell her own work. And the more she practiced, the sooner she would start making real money, and the sooner she could move out of this house.

Autumn remembered a time when the three of them had been happy together. It had existed – she was sure of it. Maybe they would get back there again, maybe they wouldn’t. Until then, she was staying out of the way. One thing was for sure, though – she was never getting married if this was what it led to. She would go on dates with lots of glamorous artists instead.

They all began quietly bracing themselves for what would come next. More fights, more nights of coldly and silently staring at each other across the kitchen table. Maybe an affair for one or both of them, and then the inevitable divorce.

But after Dawn’s first day at work… something strange happened.

She found herself smiling more, as if she were genuinely happy. Maybe she was. And Liam started kissing her for no reason, the way he used to. She didn’t understand any of it, but she wasn’t going to complain.

Was that all they had needed? A break from the money stress that had been hounding them since Liam lost his job? Something to keep Dawn’s active mind busy? It seemed too easy.

Dawn asked Liam about it one day. “It’s been a long time since I saw you smile,” he answered simply. She thought back and realized he was right. Before her new job, when was the last time she had really smiled?

Maybe it really was that simple after all.

But as happy as Liam was at seeing Dawn come back to life again, it didn’t change the fact that being without a job was slowly driving him crazy. Now it was even worse – he had no one for company during the day but Silas, and Silas usually had Lacey over and had no interest in talking to his brother. Not that Silas was the company he would have chosen anyway.

The more time Liam spent at work, the more the household responsibilities fell to him. Soon he was the one cooking every meal, and cleaning up afterwards, and scrubbing the toilets when Lacey threw up in them (just how much did she and Silas drink for her to always be throwing up in their toilets, anyway?). It only made sense – he was the only one home all the time. Even Silas had gotten some job he wouldn’t talk about that had him working at all hours of the night. But it made him uneasy, all the same. This was never the way their lives had been before. He had enjoyed rising in the ranks of the business world. He had liked his corner office and his business lunches. He had liked knowing that as long as he kept pushing himself as hard as he could, eventually he would reach the top. Now all that was gone, and he didn’t know what he had left.

And then there was the morning when, making scrambled eggs of all things, he set the house on fire.

He had gotten up early to make sure Dawn and Autumn had plenty of time for breakfast in time for work. He had still been groggy when he stumbled into the kitchen; maybe he had overlooked something crucial, like a piece of the box for one of Silas’s frozen dinners stuck to the bottom of the pan. All he knew was that one minute he was stirring eggs and laughing with Silas about the latest crop of incompetent politicians, and the next the smoke alarm was blaring and his pajama top was on fire.

Silas reacted quickly with the fire extinguisher, but not before Liam was thoroughly scorched. Thankfully, there was no lasting damage, but it only increased Liam’s conviction that something had to change about the way they were living.

At home all day with nothing interesting to do, Liam had a lot of time to notice things. Like the fact that Lacey was getting rounder around the midsection every time she came over.

“Oh, yeah, she’s pregnant,” said Silas nonchalantly when Liam mentioned it to him one night.

Liam exploded. Silas’s girlfriend was pregnant, and Silas was just sleeping on their couch like nothing had changed? He needed to marry her. He needed to find the three of them – or the four of them, since didn’t Lacey already have a kid? – a nice place to live where everyone had beds of their own. If he could manage all that when he was still a teenager, Silas could manage it now.

Silas didn’t see what the big deal was. How could he even know the baby was his?

But Liam insisted. He wasn’t exactly a fan of Lacey, but if Silas wasn’t going to help her the way she deserved, then he no longer had a place on their couch.

Asking Lacey to marry him was too much for Silas. Sure, he liked her well enough, but that didn’t mean he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. He didn’t even know whether he wanted to live with her. But at Liam’s insistence – and with the promise of a loan from Liam, a loan that took money Liam and Dawn didn’t have – he found a small place nearby for him and Lacey and the baby (and Lacey’s daughter Winter, whose name he couldn’t even remember half the time, a fact that annoyed Liam to no end).

Without Silas around, the house seemed strangely empty. The morning after he left, the family woke up to find the couch deserted for what felt like the first time in years.