Maisie chimed in, a public defender taking on Grant’s case. “The tooth fairy is supposed to leave money so that kids can buy toys.”
On some level, Patrick knew this, but he didn’t keep cash in the house. He had found a few pennies in a junk drawer and some loose change Rosa had collected from his pockets near the washing machine, but knew last night that wouldn’t be nearly enough. “It’s different in California.”
“Why?”
“Because sometimes the tooth fairy runs out of cash after visiting the East Coast kids, and by the time she gets to the West Coast she has to leave prizes. Look, if you’re not happy with it, I’ll buy it from you. How does fifty dollars sound?”
Maisie’s jaw almost hit the floor. “Fifty dollars!”
Patrick was confused. Was that not enough? “Well, how much is fair?”
“I used to get one dollar.”
“Fine. One dollar, one dollar!” Patrick yelled on his way back to the kitchen, like a game show contestant when everyone else had overbid.
“No, fifty!” Grant knew a good deal when he heard one.
“Fine, but you have to share it with your sister.” The kids hopped back up on their stools and Patrick slid Grant’s plate in front of him in exchange for the Playbill so they wouldn’t get syrup on Porgy.
Grant picked up a fork skeptically. “Mom used to make them like Mickey Mouse.”
Patrick rolled his eyes. “So I heard. Look, you don’t want to eat ears. Even pancake ones. They’re filled with wax and, I don’t know . . .” He thought back to what his own father used to say. “Potato bugs.” It was day two of this misadventure and he was already resorting to dad jokes.
Grant laughed, and Patrick squeezed some extra syrup on his plate as a reward.
“Further, Disney owns everything. They don’t need to own brunch, too.”
“Why is this brunch and not breakfast?” Grant asked.
“Because I cooked for you hellions, so it’s an occasion.”
Maisie lifted the pancake off her plate just enough to peer underneath it. “What do you mean, they own everything?” She seemed very uncertain about her food, even though Patrick was impressed with the pancake’s even pecan color. “What do they own?”
“What do they own?” Patrick repeated incredulously. “Pixar. Marvel. Lucasfilm, 20th Century Fox, ESPN, the Disney Store, Disney Channel, Disney World, Disneyland, Disney Plus, Disney Cruise Line, Disney on Ice, the El Capitan Theatre, Disney Theatricals, the Netherlands probably, you name it they own it. They used to own me, if you can believe that.”
“What are you even talking about?”
“My show was on ABC. Don’t you guys read Variety?”
“No, we’re kids.” Maisie finally decided her pancake was safe enough to try, and she sectioned off a small bite.
“What do you read, then?”
“Kid thtuff.” Grant’s speech impediment seemed exacerbated by maple syrup, as if Mrs. Butterworth herself had stapled his tongue to the roof of his mouth.
“Kid stuff. Hmm. Well, so you know, they had me locked in a pretty airtight contract, turning tricks for the mouse. Which isn’t to say my people didn’t renegotiate as soon as I had even a modicum of leverage.” Patrick rested his hand on the Golden Globe as evidence. “But still.”
“Who are your people?”
“Who are my people? Well, I got rid of them all. CAA. ICM. WME. SAG. Triple A. Anything with three letters. It’s all bullsh—crap. Why? Who are your people?”
“We don’t have people.”
“You don’t have people?! Well, you have me. And that’s not nothing. Anyhow. Actors are products to the entertainment industry; it’s dehumanizing. They chew you up and spit you out. And that sort of thing sticks with a person.” Patrick looked out the window in time to see his neighbor Dwayne, the D in JED, walking their dog, Lorna. He waved and Dwayne looked up in time to wave back. “We could do pancakes in the shape of something else. Daffy Duck, perhaps. I’ve always had a favorable opinion of Warner Brothers. I’ve never done a Warner picture, so that’s probably why.” Patrick used to enjoy amusing himself by pretending he was an actor under the old studio system, spoon-fed amphetamines to keep him tap-dancing for days; these jokes were probably lost on the kids. Fortunately, the extra syrup had done the trick. Grant swirled his last bite of pancake around his plate in the most elegant pattern, like his fork was Michelle Kwan in Edmonton, 1996.
“Can you do Paw Patrol?” Grant asked.
“Paw Patrol Pancakes?” Patrick took a long sip of his coffee. “I like the alliteration. What’s Paw Patrol?”
“They’re search and rescue dogs,” Maisie explained.
Patrick glanced over at his phone. “Hey, Siri, what’s Paw Patrol?”
“I found the following results for prawn petrol.”
“Oh, for god’s sake.” Patrick reached for his phone, knocking the wooden spoon resting across the bowl of pancake batter onto the floor. He looked down; it would be easy enough to wipe up off the terrazzo floors.
“Aren’t you going to get that?”
“It’s fine. Just remind me to clean it up so Rosa doesn’t have to.”
“Who’s Rosa?”
“Oh, you’ll love Rosa. She comes on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. She’ll make us a real brunch. Do you like chilaquiles?” The kids didn’t know how to answer. Patrick unlocked his phone and typed Paw Patrol into Google and scrolled through the results. “Produced in association with TVOntario, which is owned by the government of Canada. Good one, Grant!” He gave his nephew a high five. “Canada is harmless and the prime minister is a total snack, so we can do Paw Patrol. But another time, because we have to move beyond brunch and start planning our day. What are you guys thinking, do you have anything on your calendars?”
“We don’t have calendars, either,” Maisie said, annoyed.
“No people, no calendars. How do you keep track of your meetings, appointments? Do you have assistants at least?” Patrick threw her a smirk.
“No.”
“Well, neither do I. Not anymore. Just Rosa on every other weekday.” Since he was mostly pulling their legs, Patrick didn’t go into detail about how he preferred it that way. That assistants and agents and publicists often created just as much work as they fielded. (One of his past assistants had reorganized his closet unannounced and sent a shirt that had belonged to Joe to dry cleaning. Patrick had to race across town and beg them to give it back uncleaned; it had long since lost Joe’s scent, but that was not the point.) Instead, he picked up his phone and pretended to open his calendar app. “Well, look at that. I have a light day, too. So . . . what should we do? What do you guys do with your friends?”
“What do you do with your friends?”
Patrick grew wistful. It had been a long time since he had spent any time with his friends. “We drink rosé and talk about Best Actress Oscar winners. Is that what you do?”
“No.” Maisie drew her chin into her neck until it all but disappeared.
“Not even with Audra Brackett? It’s fun. Like, who is your favorite Best Actress winner?”
“I don’t know.” Grant shrugged comically, as if he should actually have an opinion.
“Well, that’s a bit of a trick question, because there’s really only one correct answer and that’s Faye Dunaway, 1976.”
“That’s before we were born,” Maisie protested.
“That’s before I was born, but I still know this stuff!” Patrick paused, doing a quick calculation in his head to see if that was a lie. “I would also accept Isabelle Huppert, 2016, even though they awarded her Oscar to Emma Stone.”
Grant rested his head on the counter as if he were terminally bored. “We want to do something.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know, what is there to do?”
“You guys
visited once before. You don’t remember what there is to do?”
“I was just a baby!” Grant protested.
“Dinosaurs!” Maisie bounced up and down on her stool with excitement. Patrick had taken them to see the Cabazon dinosaurs featured in the movie Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Together they looked at the giant T. rex and brontosaurus sculptures and dug in warm sand for “fossils” (fake bones you could trade in for prizes). The wind had caused the sand to kick up in their faces, but there was a water table where you could “mine” for gold, and it was there Patrick learned how much kids responded to water. Whatever the activity (washlet spritzing, for instance), the wetter the better.
“I was thinking something closer to home. Maybe we could swim in the pool and then this afternoon we could play a game?”
“POOL!” Grant hollered.
“You can each pick a pool float and I’ll inflate them while you dip yourselves in sunscreen. I’ve got a flamingo, a unicorn, a Jeff Koons balloon dog, a slice of pizza. A diamond ring, but that’s meant to be ironic.”
“Why do you have tho many?”
“For you guys, silly. Also, companies just send me this garbage because I have a pool and a lot of Instagram followers. I even have a lobster your mother gave me one time. A New England thing, I guess. To remind me of my roots. But that’s more Maine than Connecticut.”
“Can I put my face in the water?” Grant asked.
“If you don’t, I’ll put it in for you.”
“Can we bring the toilet?”
“What? No. Why? Pee in the bushes like a normal person.”
“To squirt each other with.”
“Are you crazy? It’s attached to the floor with a wax seal. But we’ll get Super Soakers or something later and you can squirt each other to your heart’s content. Until then, we’ll use the hose.”
Grant grinned wide, all teeth (minus one) and gums.
“Just put your plate in the sink.”
Grant jumped down from his barstool, collected his plate, and gave his uncle a big hug. “Thanks, GUP.”
“It’s settled, then,” Patrick said, making a mental note of Maisie’s nonreaction to it all. “And don’t get syrup on me.”
* * *
“Where’s your sister?” Patrick asked as he and Grant stood in their swimsuits, towels flung over their shoulders. Grant had streaks of sunscreen down his arms and across his face as Patrick tried his best to cover him in the lotion Greg had packed in their suitcase. The sunscreen was specifically designed for kids (it had a blue lizard on the bottle), but was total garbage as far as he could tell because it was impossible to rub in—Grant’s arms looked as if they’d been painted like fence pickets. And if that weren’t awful enough, the kid wore these green goggles tightly around his face, making him look like an albino gecko.
“She doesn’t want to thwim.”
“What do you mean she doesn’t want to swim? She loves swimming. On your last visit, we had to drag her out of the pool just to—What is wrong with this lotion?”
“What do you mean?”
“I should not have to touch you this much. It seems inappropriate.”
“Why?”
“Nothing. Just . . . nothing.” Patrick gave up on the chore and took to rubbing the last bit of lotion off his hands onto his towel. “Maybe we’ll just stay inside for the rest of the summer.”
Grant looked skeptically at his uncle.
“What?”
“You have a lot of muscles.”
“Thank you. One day I’ll tell you about gay men and body dysmorphia, but not today.”
Grant shrugged. “Can just we go?” He tugged on Patrick’s Mr. Turk swimsuit.
“Where’d you get those goggles? Your father packed those, too?”
Grant nodded.
“Just, hold your horses.”
“I don’t have any horthes.”
“Then practice holding your breath.”
Grant took a huge gulp of air and clamped his mouth shut. Patrick paused. He’ll know to take a breath before he passes out, right? He held his face up to his nephew’s and could see the boy was clearly breathing out of his nose. Ridiculous. He exited and headed toward the room the kids had claimed as theirs.
Maisie was sitting on the edge of the guest bed, looking tiny, meek, staring down at her bare feet, which didn’t quite touch the floor. Their suitcases were open, but not unpacked; Patrick said they could wait and see if they still enjoyed sharing a room before they fully settled in.
“What gives?”
She kicked her feet against the edge of the bed, not angry, but clearly frustrated. “I don’t want to go swimming.”
“Of course you do, put your suit on.”
She didn’t respond. Didn’t even so much as look up. Patrick kept his attention focused on her, but she wasn’t going to budge. What was wrong with these kids? He had a swimming pool, for Christ’s sake. It’s not like Connecticut was littered with them. Wasn’t this a big deal? Eventually he threw his hands up and retreated back to the living room to find Grant. “What’s her problem?”
“She doesn’t like the thwimsuit Daddy packed for her,” Grant said.
“What, she wants me to buy her a new one? Is that how this summer is going to go? You guys are going to shake me down for stuff?” Patrick stroked his chin as that sank in. “Because, I’ve got to hand it to you. As plans go, that’s pretty smart and I’m an easy mark.”
“It’s a thecret.”
“See-cret,” Patrick emphasized. “What’s a secret?”
“She doesn’t want me to thay.”
“Did she tell you snitches get stitches? Because that only applies in prison.” He looked down at Grant, who didn’t follow. A new tactic was required. “Is she into something else now? Books? Puzzles? The sport Lacrosse? It would help us get outside a lot faster if you told me.”
Grant looked up at his uncle and then, after careful consideration, motioned for him to come closer (the promise of swimming trumped his short-lived gig as confidant). Patrick leaned down and Grant whispered the secret in his ear. He furrowed his brow, confused, but only momentarily; what Grant had to say sunk in quickly. When Patrick realized how gracefully Sara had handled the situation, it made him miss her even more. He looked heavenward. “You really were cut out for this; I never was.”
“What?” Grant asked, confused.
“Nothing. Got it.” He rested his hand on his nephew’s head. “Thank you for telling me. Give me two more minutes, bud. Then we’re headed out to the pool.”
Grant looked down at his arms like he was growing paler by the second and didn’t have two minutes to spare.
Patrick rounded the corner to the back bedroom to find Maisie in the same spot. “Follow me.” He motioned for her with his hand, and then turned and exited, assuming correctly she would fall in line. They marched back through the living room toward the master suite on the other side of the house, Maisie five steps behind. In his bedroom, Patrick opened his sliding closet doors and pushed a few of his shirts on wooden hangers aside, then waited for Maisie to get a good look. “See these? These are my caftans. This is my morning caftan, this one is my after-sun caftan, this one here is for company, this one is dressy, and this one is the one I sometimes wear after a night swim—right before bed. Do you know what some people would call these?”
Maisie stared at them in awe. They were every color all at once, loud paisleys and tribal designs; some looked like spin art she had once done at school. “Dresses?”
“That’s right. Are they? No. Well. Maybe. But I don’t care. Because they’re fun, and they make me feel good, and I like wearing them. When the temperature swells over one hundred, you don’t want anything tight touching your skin.” Patrick pulled his after-sun caftan off the hanger, a rich midnight blue with a loud yellow and magenta paisley pattern, and
pulled it on over his head. “This is the best thing to wear for today, you understand.” Patrick affected an old-money New England accent. “Because I don’t like women in skirts and the best thing is to wear pantyhose or some pants under a short skirt, I think. Then you have the pants under the skirt and you can pull the stockings up over the pants underneath the skirt. And you can always take off the skirt and use it as a cape. So I think this is the best costume for today.”
When he finished, Maisie looked at him like he had two heads.
“That’s Little Edie’s speech from Grey Gardens. You don’t know that, either? It’s on YouTube, you know. Joe and I used to perform that over and over for each other.” Patrick bit his lip, lost in the memory. They would put on the most ridiculous things and march through the house waving small flags.
“Who’s Joe?”
Patrick froze. How had he let that name slip so easily? “He was a friend of mine, a long time ago.” He moved past it as quickly as he could. “Guncle Rule number seven: In this house we wear what we want, it doesn’t matter if it’s for boys or girls. Anything goes, anything you want, so long as it doesn’t have mean words printed on it and it’s not making fun of anyone else. We don’t worry about what others think. Deal?”
“Deal,” Maisie agreed.
“Now, what would you like to wear to swim?”
Maisie touched the caftan’s fabric, rubbing it between her fingers. It was soft, rayon or something, not fancy (Patrick’s lesson on quality things would wait for another day). It took her a moment to gather the courage to say, “I don’t like girls’ bathing suits.”
“And your mom knew that, so she let you wear shorts and a T-shirt? But your dad wasn’t thinking and packed an old swimsuit of yours that you no longer like to wear? I promise you it was just a simple oversight. Go find something to swim in for today, and tomorrow we’ll go to the store and get you proper swim attire. That you like. A rash guard shirt, with long sleeves maybe, that would help protect you against the sun.”
A smile spread across Maisie’s face. “I know just the T-shirt.”
“Then that is the best costume for today.”
The Guncle Page 7
