My Only Bitchy Cousin Is A Yankee-type Guy- The... Apr 2026

Aunt Patty, who had just driven four hours through Atlanta traffic, looked like she was considering using those discrete units to commit a felony.

That was Bradley. He never learned to cool off. He just got sharper.

“I know,” I said, sitting down next to him. “You’re a terrible liar.”

“Because,” he said, “you’re the only people who tell me to shut up to my face.” My Only Bitchy Cousin Is a Yankee-Type Guy- The...

The summer we turned twelve was the summer he officially became my “bitchy cousin.” The whole extended family went to a lake house. My uncle had a boat. There were tubes to be pulled, fish to be caught, and a rope swing that had probably killed at least two people in the 80s. It was perfect.

“And you’re my only bitchy cousin.”

I pushed him off the dock.

We grew up in the sticky, kudzu-choked humidity of central Georgia. He grew up in a gray, tastefully expensive suburb of Boston. And every summer, his parents would ship him down to my grandmother’s farm for two weeks of “family connection.” Those two weeks were my annual descent into hell.

My uncle laughed. My grandmother handed him a towel and said, “You needed to cool off, honey.”

“Why do you come down here every year if everything we do is wrong, everything we eat is garbage, and everything we say sounds stupid to your fancy Yankee ears?” Aunt Patty, who had just driven four hours

I stood up. “Bradley,” I said, sweet as pie, “I have a question.”

That night, after everyone went to bed, I found him on the back porch, looking at the stars. The sky in Georgia is nothing like the sky in Connecticut. He had a beer—a Miller Lite, because he was still a Yankee-Type Guy and couldn’t drink a proper sweet ale to save his life.

My grandmother just smiled and said, “Well, bless his heart. He gets that from his father’s side.” He just got sharper

Bradley refused to swim because the lake had “fecal coliform counts.” He wouldn’t eat the fried catfish because it was “unnecessarily greasy.” And when I finally got him to sit on the dock with his feet in the water— just his feet —he looked at me and said, with the gravity of a Supreme Court justice, “You know, your accent makes you sound like you have a learning disability.”