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

And honestly? I wouldn’t have it any other way.

That is my cousin. Sharp-tongued, cashmere-clad, suspicious of humidity, and brutally, beautifully honest. He is the only family member who tells me when I have spinach in my teeth. He is the only one who will say, “That man is a walking red flag” before I’ve even finished describing a date. My Only Bitchy Cousin Is a Yankee-Type Guy- The...

My mother gasped. My aunt clutched her pearls. I, however, felt a flicker of something unfamiliar: validation. No one had ever criticized the cheese platter before. We just accepted it, like humidity or regret. Sterling, in one bitchy sentence, had named the unspoken truth: the cheese was terrible. At first, I thought he was just rude. But over the following holidays, I began to see a pattern. My cousin wasn’t mean; he was precise. Where the rest of us used passive aggression ("Oh, isn't that an interesting haircut?"), Sterling used direct aggression ("That haircut is a war crime"). And honestly

To call him a "Yankee-type guy" is an understatement. Sterling is less a man and more a collection of grievances wrapped in a slim-fit cashmere sweater. He is from Boston, which he reminds us of every time someone offers him a biscuit (“No thank you, I prefer a gluten-free scone”). He is my only cousin who is openly, proudly, and unapologetically bitchy—and as a Southern woman raised to “bless your heart” my enemies into submission, I have found myself locked in a strange, begrudging respect for him. My mother gasped

He is still bitchy. He is still a Yankee-type guy. Last Christmas, he called my pecan pie “aggressively mediocre.” Then he ate two slices.

This is the story of how my only bitchy cousin, the Yankee-type guy, became the most honest person in my family. It began at my grandmother’s 80th birthday. The entire clan was gathered in her humid kitchen in Savannah, Georgia. The air was thick with the smell of fried okra and judgment. I was arranging a cheese platter (cheddar cubes and Ritz crackers, the sacred plate of the South) when Sterling walked in.

There is a peculiar kind of loneliness that comes from being the only polite person at a family reunion. It is a stillness in the chaos, a quiet sip of sweet tea while the rest of your kinfolk are hollering about college football or arguing over who makes the best banana pudding. I had grown accustomed to this solitude until one Thanksgiving, when the screen door slammed and in walked the human equivalent of a Park Avenue pothole: my cousin, Sterling.