I always liked Eunice, and I think she got to where she liked me well enough, after she got over my marrying her little sister away from her. No, really. That’s how she saw it. She made it quite clear. At full volume.

            “You cannot take my fucking sister away from me you asshole!” she screamed, the night we announced to her family that Margi and I were getting married.

            Yeah, so it took her a while, but then I think she did come around. Or at least started showing up. Usually unannounced.

            One time she showed up well before dawn, pounding on the front door with some crazy-ass contraption that spit out the worst-tasting buckwheat pancakes she insisted on drowning in undiluted sorghum.

Or when she arrived with that jazz trumpet player and took up a month-long residence in the basement. Thank God the kids hadn’t been born yet, or they’d have gotten one hell of an education in human mating calls.

            Or that time when the kids were still small and she dropped in when we were having that barbecue for Margi’s coworkers, and we caught her in the side-yard bushes humping Margi’s married boss.

            It wasn’t always Wild Eunice who arrived at our door, though. Often she was in trouble, almost always of her own making.

            Once, we arrived home from the symphony to find her sitting on her suitcase on the porch in the rain, the babysitter refusing to let the sobbing woman in, no matter who she claimed to be.

            Or the time she locked herself in the bathroom for so long we had to call the fire department. Hell, even I could have kicked in the damn door.

            But, you know, I liked her, despite everything.

Sure, I needed a seatbelt of some kind around her, an emotional seatbelt, but it was worth it. And to be honest, I had some of the most interesting, introspective, and if I can be permitted, intellectually philosophical discussions I’ve ever had in my life.

            See, she was a sweetheart in a lot of ways. To me and the kids, at least.

            No matter what her mood, she never arrived without gifts or something interesting for the kids, almost always personalized to whatever each of them was interested in those days. Though how she knew that was beyond Margi and me.

            I remember one of the last times she stayed with us, that time she called from Carbondale for me to pick her up after her car was repossessed. Again.

We were having drinks on the back patio, and and she leaned over and bumped her shoulder into mine.

“You’ve always been good to me,” she said. “You know that?”

“Because I love you, Eunice.”

“Not everyone does.”

            “Their loss.”

            “Let me tell you something then, OK?”

“Sure.”

“Embrace the journey and look for the lessons, because sometimes life’s about playing a poor hand well.”

            And Eunice learned a lot in life.