Grant shrugged without sitting back in his seat. “I’m being mythelf.”
“You know, it’s one thing if you throw my own words back in my face, but do not throw Oscar Wilde’s. Now sit up like human beings or at least use a straw.” Patrick picked up one of the paper-wrapped drinking straws Barry had left for them, tore off one end, and blew a puff of air through the straw so that the wrapper hit Maisie square between the eyes. Grant erupted in laughter. “So what do you think?”
“About what?” Grant managed as he tried to control his giggles.
“About brunch!” Patrick said. “It’s growing on you, isn’t it?”
“I can only eat thoft foods.”
“Why?”
“Loothe tooth.”
“WHAT?”
Maisie translated. “His tooth is loose.”
“What sort of Dr. Seuss nightmare is this?” Patrick muttered under his breath. “So?”
“What if it falls out?”
“I do not like a loose tooth, I do not like one in this booth. I do not like a tooth at brunch, I do not like foods that crunch.”
“Be therious!” Grant implored. “What if my tooth falls out?”
“Then we’ll just shove it back in.” He took a long sip of his champagne, ignoring Grant’s stunned expression. He let the bubbles evenly coat his tongue before letting them slide down his throat. Maybe they weren’t so hard to manage, the kids. “Perhaps you can come visit. You know. For a few days. You could even invite Audra what’s-her-face.”
“Brackett.”
“That’s right.” If they brought a friend, they might even amuse themselves.
“Actually, we can’t,” Maisie replied.
“You can’t?” Patrick was surprised. Relieved, somewhat. But surprised. “You have other commitments?”
“No.”
“Then why not?”
Maisie looked down at her plate. “I don’t want to leave Mom.”
Patrick placed his silverware on his plate, the knife carefully between the tines of his fork. He recognized their grief, how untethered they were from the life they had known. He reached out and pulled the kids close to him, until he had one nestled under each arm. It was his job now to give them something, anything, to hold on to. “Let me tell you something. You can’t ever leave your mother, just as she can never really leave you.”
Maisie looked up at him, pleading for more.
Patrick inhaled, hoping the oxygen would give him the stamina to continue. Sara was very much there, in Maisie’s expressions, or Grant’s stoicism. He’d never had any interest in children himself but suddenly recognized some small appeal; Sara had found a way to live beyond death. “She’s half of you and you’re half of her.” He looked at them both, hoping this made sense, hoping that it would sink in. He saw Sara’s eyes staring back at him. “So . . . yeah. Just like brunch. Half breakfast. Half lunch.” He smiled; they seemed to like this. “We’re going to figure this out.” Patrick kissed the top of each child’s head before pushing them off of him and back toward their own place settings with a sudden nagging that they were in danger of becoming too attached. There has to be another way. “Now,” he began, picking up his fork and knife to resume eating. “Who here has heard of a snappetizer?”
Both kids stared at him blankly.
“Are you being serious?” he asked. “Boy. You’re lucky I got here when I did.”
THREE
Patrick could feel his sister approaching before she emerged from behind two enormous parked cars, boatlike sedans they used to give away on The Hollywood Squares that seemed no longer to exist in California. His blood chilled ten degrees. He stood his ground in the parking lot between the church and the cemetery as Clara marched toward him with the sense of purpose she’d exuded since childhood—rigorous posture, heavy steps that fell just shy of stomping, always a little bit pained—and with an almost masculine energy that Patrick, in his adolescence, had been jealous of. Her clothing was a pastiche of Style sections in midlist women’s magazines (publications perhaps better suited to cookie recipes than fashion), and the sunglasses she wore on top of her head had taken root somewhere in her scalp.
“It was a nice service,” she said when she arrived at his side.
Nice. Patrick looked at the sky; the nimbus clouds were gray but not threatening. “Rain held off.” He didn’t know how to behave at these things any more than she did.
“It’s fun to see you back in Connecticut. I thought maybe you were done with us.”
“Planes fly west, you know.” It was an old argument. When Patrick moved to Los Angeles he flew home regularly for years, every six months or so until he stopped. It was the show, it was his schedule. Everyone assumed fame had changed him. And, to some extent, it had. It gave him the confidence to call out hypocrisy where he saw it. He came home, no one came to see him. After a while he began to wonder: What was the point?
“You’re off the hook, by the way. I talked to Darren. We agreed he and I should take the children for the summer.”
Patrick’s whole body loosened, like he’d just walked out of ninety minutes of Reiki. Oh, thank god.
“They should stay in Connecticut to be closer to their friends,” she continued.
“Like Audra Brackett. And whomever Grant pals around with.”
“Who?”
Patrick blew right past her question. “It was farcical,” he offered. “The very idea.”
“I mean, can you imagine?” Clara laughed, and she never laughed. Patrick always thought he would welcome it, the sound of his sister’s laughter; instead, he was immediately put off. “It was good of you to come.” She placed her hand on his forearm and gave it a condescending squeeze.
Patrick had delivered the eulogy. He’d written two on the plane; he gave the version he knew others wanted to hear. About Sara the wife, Sara the mother, Sara the very definition of family. The other was for the Sara he knew. Sara the loyal, Sara the thrill seeker, Sara the irreverent, Sara the brother-fucker. It would have amused him, sharing old stories. The time he took her to the Ramrod, a Boston leather bar, and people mistook her for a drag queen. The time they were arrested for sneaking into the Granary Burying Ground after dark to make rubbings of the gravestones. The time she screamed obscenities in the face of religious protesters the first time they attended Pride. He came close to pulling the second eulogy out of his jacket pocket. But in the end it was for his Sara, not theirs, so he left it in his breast pocket, where it sat directly over his heart.
“Still. Greg asked me to take the kids. Not you.”
Clara pulled her hand away. “Greg was probably high at the time.”
“We don’t have to do this.”
“Do what?”
“It’s not a requirement, is all I’m saying.”
“A requirement of what?”
“Our being related. A lot of people just love their family.”
“I love my family.”
“Okay.”
“I do!”
Patrick fluttered his lips. “You don’t like us very much.”
“You two don’t make it easy.” Clara, the oldest, had always viewed Patrick and Greg as twin nuisances, equal bothers to an otherwise orderly existence.
Patrick shrugged and looked out over the cemetery.
“Anyhow, I have the next few months off. I was going to teach summer school, but my friend Anita is going on maternity leave in the fall, so she was more than happy to take on additional classes before then.”
He was only half listening. “Who?”
“Anita. My friend Anita.”
Patrick surveyed the crowd; it seemed they didn’t know what to do. No one wanted to leave, but everyone looked pained to stay. “Greg has a point, wanting the kids near him.”
Clara didn’t like the look in his eye; he was piecing
together a puzzle. “Would you stop? You don’t even want to do this. Let’s not kid ourselves. I’m giving you an out.”
Patrick didn’t know what he found more irksome, the fact that she knew he would want a way out, or that under any other circumstance he would take it. He patted himself down; the second eulogy in his pocket crinkled, like Sara asking him a favor.
“Patrick.”
“Clara.” Patrick locked eyes with his sister. “The kids mentioned they didn’t have many friends. That their house had become too sad. Is that true?”
“You know other kids. They’re afraid of anyone who is going through something . . . different. It will sort itself out.”
“What about your kids?”
“What about my kids?”
“Don’t they spend time together?” Patrick asked. He hadn’t really grown up around cousins, but shouldn’t they be forced to be friends?
“They’re teenagers.”
An image was emerging of Maisie and Grant as loners, just like him. Perhaps he couldn’t be a guardian to these kids, but, cousins be damned, as their uncle he could be a friend. “Wait, did you say Darren agreed you could take the kids? Or you should.”
“What difference does that make?”
“It makes a difference to me.” Patrick felt himself growing redder. People whispered and glanced in his direction.
“Calm yourself. Your voice is doing that squeaky thing. Remember when you first learned to answer the telephone and people would call you ma’am?”
Patrick nodded at some asshole who was staring at him. “Don’t change the subject.”
Clara continued. “You have this vision, Patrick, of playing some role. Of stepping in like you’re some glamorous Uncle Mame.” She chuckled. “Uncle Ma’am.”
“Have you discussed that with Darren, too?”
“You’re not Rosalind Russell. And it’s not what these children need.”
“Then why do I look so natural with a long cigarette holder?” He held his hand up to mime just such a thing.
“You don’t look natural, you look like you’re going to skin someone’s dog.”
Patrick used to like having a sister. It gave him permission to indulge in the activities he longed to do—color, weave, make paper bag puppets, play dress-up. They could play together, under the umbrella of her interests. When his father suggested he go outside, Patrick could rightfully say Clara was his playmate, she was older—she set the agenda. But she eventually moved on, wanted to do other things. As a teenager she liked reading and, it seemed, just about nothing else. She read a book by Alice Walker about female genital mutilation in Africa and refused to speak to a member of the opposite sex for a month. She read Simone de Beauvoir and fumed about the patriarchy to any male in earshot—even if he were four years her junior. Patrick thought his coming out would restore their relationship; if the problem was straight white male privilege, he no longer identified with the trifecta and now had his own history of oppression. Yet somehow she took his lack of attraction to women as yet another affront to the sex.
“They just lost their mother, Patrick.”
The kids lost their mother, Greg lost his wife. Why didn’t anyone acknowledge his loss? Or remember that he knew Sara first? If it wasn’t for him bringing her into their lives, he would be the only one of them at this goddamn service.
Patrick jumped up and down like a swimmer before entering the pool, like a boxer about to enter the ring. His heart raced with dread and adrenaline. “Yeah, I’m going to do it.”
“Do what?”
“Take the kids.”
“Patrick!” Clara put her hands on his shoulders to hold him to the ground. “Look at me. This isn’t a joke. We’re not deciding on who gets a lamp. They’re children, I’m a mother. I can give them what they need.”
Patrick glowered. Darren had two teens from a previous marriage who spent just about all of their time with their actual mother, a conspiracy theorist who jarred her own jams.
“A stepmother is a mother!”
“I’m not arguing that, those kids should be with you all the time.”
“Thank you.”
“At least then they’d be vaccinated.”
“Stop it.”
“Remember your wedding? I was bit by mosquitoes but convinced I had mumps.”
Clara pursed her lips. “Maisie and Grant have needs, Patrick. Emotional needs. They don’t even understand what has happened to them yet.”
“Of course they do, they’ve been living with this possibility for years. What they need is some fun. What they need is a change of scenery. What they need is to laugh and be silly and be kids.”
“And as the world’s oldest child—”
Patrick stopped her. “What they don’t need is someone trying to take their mother’s place.”
“I’m not trying to . . . Is that what you think?”
At that moment, Maisie and Grant ran full-speed between them, the younger chasing the older and failing miserably at catching her.
“Watch for cars!” Clara hollered instinctually as they ran away.
Patrick looked down over the top of his sunglasses.
“Oh, give me a break. That’s not mothering them, that’s just plain being responsible.”
“If you say so.”
“They are being strong right now because they’re surrounded by everyone they know and love and because there’s been something for them to do every hour of the day. But people are going to go back home, and they will stop being the center of attention and there will come a time, in a few days or a few weeks or a month, when the reality of their situation hits them and they’re going to look to you for meaning. And then what?”
“I can give them all the attention they need, thank you very much.”
“Wait until they find out they’ll be competing for your attention with you.”
Patrick took a few steps away as this new plan solidified in his mind. He could tell them about their mother. Not the mother they knew, but the woman he remembered. Under a cluster of nearby maple trees, his parents were engaged in conversation with Sara’s, the four of them huddled in a tight mass. Other family milled about, friends hugged, whispering secrets. Everyone sharing memories of a different Sara no doubt, but he knew the real one. And now so could her kids. He turned back to his sister. “Clara, I’ve got this.” He removed his sunglasses entirely to show her he meant business.
“Please. You’re terrified.”
Patrick shook his head.
“You’re not fooling me. You’re not that good of an actor.”
Greg emerged from the crowd, slumped, like he was experiencing a heavier gravitational pull. Patrick put his arm around his brother’s shoulders as Clara looked away. The problem with three is that it’s always two against one.
“I’m going to do it. What you asked.”
“You’re kidding,” Greg replied. His eyes brightened for the first time in days.
Patrick locked eyes with Clara. “I’m not.”
“You’re both morons,” she said.
“It’s my decision, Clara,” Greg told her. “I know what I’m doing.” And then, to Patrick, “Beautiful speech. Thank you. I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t have done it.”
“Remember what telemarketers called Patrick when he would answer the phone?” Clara asked, softening.
“Ma’am?” Greg asked.
Clara confirmed. “Uncle Ma’am,” she said, repeating the joke to herself.
The kids ran by on a third loop and this time Patrick nabbed them. He got down on one knee and sat Grant on his leg.
“You’re Uncle Toilet,” Grant charged.
Patrick looked up at his sister, doing his best to mask any regret. He knew this was an audition, a callback for network execs—the last hurdle before landing the role.
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br /> “Let me tell you something. Both of you.” He ushered Maisie in, too. “As a professional who has studied comedy. Bathroom humor is cheap. Okay? Guncle Rule number three. Is it an easy laugh? Yes. But it’s lazy. It’s not the laugh you want. But, I think you’ll find if you work harder, dig a little deeper, find the joke that lies beneath the obvious one, that’s when your comedy will really shine. Understand?”
They both nodded.
“Okay.” Patrick slid Grant off his knee and stood up, resting his hand on his nephew’s shoulder. He was loath to employ his own catchphrase, but this situation called for a special exception. “And that’s . . . how you do it.” He winked at Clara, knowing it would drive her a particular kind of insane.
And then Grant had to spoil his triumph by yelling, “You’re Uncle Sewer!” before running off to find his grandparents.
Greg laughed heartily, which caused those standing nearby to turn. “Well, you told him to dig deeper.”
Patrick buried his face in his hands and grumbled. “Commedia dell’farte.” Grant may have won this battle, but Patrick was determined to win the war.
The clouds above darkened in a way they didn’t in Palm Springs. A thunderstorm was imminent. Clara motioned toward the car and signaled her husband that it was time to go. She had no desire to lose an argument with her brothers and get drenched.
FOUR
“Ith that an island?”
Patrick peered across both Maisie and Grant to look out the airplane window at what lay thirty thousand feet below them. “That’s a cloud.”
“It lookth like an island.” It didn’t matter the cards he was dealt, Grant apparently always doubled down.
Patrick turned to Maisie, whose legs dangled below her seat in a way that made it look like she’d grown three inches since takeoff. “There’s only one state that’s an island, do you know what that is?” Maisie raised her hand. “And don’t say Rhode Island, because they just threw that in there to fuck with you.” Maisie dropped her hand back in her lap.
The Guncle Page 4
