Most basically, it would make her mad because the two of them must hear it a lot. (Or do they? Is it only from me?) And that, in turn, is because they are always late. For everything.
It's possible that they may have gotten a little better in the last couple of years, but Brother is almost 59. (SIL is only in her forties.) A couple of years doesn't make much difference when it stands up against decades of predictable lateness.
And honestly, the whole family jokes about them behind their backs. I may be the only one who says anything to their faces—or at any rate, the only one since Wife left the family—but my remarks are joking and friendly compared to the acid commentary from my aunts. Even Mother, who is careful never to say anything overtly critical (because Brother is, after all, her son) nonetheless builds plans around an assumption that Brother and SIL will be late.
So if this is an established pattern, where did it come from? I tried to think about it this evening, and that turns out to be a harder question than it looks like.
When Brother and I were little kids, the "Late Ones" in the extended family were the four of us: Mother and Father, with Brother and me in tow. Since the "extended family" in question was always Mother's family …
(Father was an only child, his father never saw his relatives, and my grandmother's sisters rarely visited),
… the blame was implicitly dumped on Father. The principle seems to have been, "Always blame the one who married into the family for any dysfunction, rather than one of Us."
For years I believed this, just because everyone else seemed to believe it. But in retrospect, I remember many times that we were getting ready to go somewhere and Father was standing at the front door with his car keys in hand—and suddenly Mother decided she had to wash her hair. She kept her hair very long in those days, so washing it (and drying it) was a really big deal. Father would yell impatiently (and impotently), "But we're going to be late!" And she would go ahead anyway. Sometime in the last year or so, she even admitted to me that back in the past she was bad at sticking to a schedule or getting to events on time.
Maybe this Will-to-Lateness was an aspect of her rebellion against her family. Who knows? These days—now that she's in her 80's, and there are a lot fewer demands on her schedule—she is no longer late to things. But she makes remarks about Brother and SIL (behind their backs) which assume that they will be.
For that matter, I remember that Wife used to complain that back when she was single, she was always early to events; but once she married me, she was always late. She therefore blamed me. My recollection is that often I was in the position of Father … ready to go, but having to wait for her. Who knows what the truth is?
As an aside, Son 1 and Son 2 both make it a point to be compulsively early for things. When we were all recently visiting Son 2 and Beryl, one of them (I no longer remember which) asked rhetorically, "Were we ever on time for anything back when we were kids?" It was clear that he expected and believed the answer to be No.
So I'm not sure how to account for Brother's chronic lateness.
(Wait, what about SIL? Well I don't know what she contributes to the dynamic, of course. But back before he was with her, back when he had other girlfriends, Brother was still chronically late. So it seems easiest to pin the lateness to him.)
Sorry, where was I? Oh right, the lateness. Is it a habit he inherited from us as a family being chronically late, when he was growing up? Is it a way to be loyal to the memory of Father, now that Father is gone? In some ways that would be totally in character for Brother. Of course, given the recollections I've described above, it would also be ironic. But I think family dynamics are often ironic.
I don't really know. I can think of too many possibilities, and not enough evidence to rule out which ones are impossible. Maybe I'm even wrong about thinking SIL was mad at me yesterday.
But I'm pretty sure she was.
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