The Guncle

by Steven Rowley

  “It’s okay if you don’t take me seriously, because I take myself seriously enough for both of us. You might think this is a joke, but I know more about you than you think I do and I drove two hours to have this meeting with you. Has Neal ever done that? I highly doubt he has. I know you were unhappy on television. I know your first love was the theater. I know you’re not serious about doing a solo show, because your favorite part of acting is reacting, and that’s where you truly shine.” Cassie took a deep breath. “I know when you left LA, you didn’t go far, because you’re not done with your career. You’re testing me. That’s fine. I will take your test and I will pass it. And I’ll go, but this conversation isn’t over.”

  “Tammy Tetons,” Patrick said as a smile spread across his lips. “Okay.”

  “Okay?” Cassie asked hopefully.

  “Okay.” Patrick repeated, realizing he didn’t totally hate her. That seemed . . . new. Another crash from the other room. “Don’t make me come in there!” He turned to Cassie. “Actually, do you have a job right now? Something out of state that would take me far away from here?”

  She struggled for an offer that might do.

  “I’m kidding. I have to go. We’ll need to continue this some other time.”

  Cassie opened the calendar app on her iPhone. “Okay, so when would be a better time?”

  Patrick raised his arms, making him resemble a kite. “I’m going to need you to figure that out.”

  “Come back to work, Patrick. Come back to Neal. It’s time.” She scanned his eyes for any sign this was sinking in. “Promise me you’ll at least think about it.”

  “I’ll think about it.” But the truth was, at the moment he had bigger things to think about. Like where to buy bicycle helmets.

  NINE

  If Maisie and Grant were going to insist on keeping the temperature at anything less than one hundred and one, they were going to have to consider a new descriptive word for the hot tub. Patrick didn’t force the issue—boiling children while they were entrusted to him seemed unwise. And it was summer, after all; even though the sun had dipped behind the mountains, it was still hovering around ninety degrees (his blood had thinned over the past few years, but it doesn’t mean theirs had). Still, it had become a routine. Each evening after lupper they had a post-meal swim and a soak and partook in one of their favorite activities, watching the outdoor solar lights pop on as dusk settled over the yard.

  “There’s one!” Grant yelled. He splashed the twist right out of his uncle’s vodka on the rocks as he raised his arm from the water.

  “Easy. Easy.”

  “It’s one of the colored ones!”

  “Score,” Patrick said with just enough interest to keep Grant from throwing a fit. But the colored ones were fun, situated under the citrus trees (tangelo and Mexican lime mostly, a lemon and two pink grapefruit) that lined the back of the property and made interesting shapes and shadows along the white concrete wall that separated his property from JED’s.

  Patrick looked up for a glimpse of Venus, usually the first light to appear in the gloaming, but quickly abandoned his search. It was getting harder and harder to see without his glasses, which he largely refused to wear on principle ever since his eye doctor suggested it was about time for progressives, which, as far as Patrick could tell, was a fancy way for him to avoid saying bifocals. Besides, tonight they were not there just to count the lights and the shimmering stars as they made their appearance in the sky. Patrick had an agenda, developed from the book he’d ordered himself on grief. He took a long sip of his drink for courage. “I was wondering if either of you were missing your mom tonight, because I know I was—missing her—and I thought we might talk about it.” His reading had suggested he find a way to communicate his own grief to light the way forward. And when it came to his own grief, oh, where to begin.

  Grant sculled across the water, using his cupped hands as oars. Maisie kicked her legs until they broke the surface.

  “C’mon. You gotta help me out here. You don’t talk to me about this stuff. I’m not sure if you’re waiting for me to talk to you. We can’t waste the whole summer being polite.” Patrick had been wondering of late if Clara hadn’t been right. He could clothe them and feed them and keep them alive, amuse them with a playful remark. But was he really what they needed in this fraught situation?

  Grant propelled himself back to Patrick’s side and sat next to him, placing his small hands on his uncle’s shoulder. He whispered in Patrick’s ear. “You mith Mom?” It was as if the concept took him completely by surprise.

  “They were friends, dummy,” Maisie said.

  “Hey, hey, hey. No one’s a dummy.”

  A bat flew by overhead and Maisie screamed.

  “It’s just a bat. They’re friendly. They eat bugs.”

  “Bats are for Halloween.”

  “Well, in the desert they’re for summer, too. But they never bother anyone. They just do their thing.” Patrick respected them for that and, almost to prove a point, he traced the bat’s flight path with his finger across the sky.

  “You and Mommy were friends?” Grant asked. He knew the answer of course, but this was also part of what he needed, Patrick reasoned—reassurance. Wanting to hear old stories again and again and again, sifting through them for gleaming new details like a prospector panning for gold.

  “We were. Good friends.” For a moment he resented them both, perhaps for the clarity of their grief. People understood the horror of losing a mother. They understood who Sara was to them. People didn’t know what she meant to Patrick. Or if they had, they had long ago forgotten. “Ironically, better friends before she shacked up with your dad. But that’s, you know, just the way of the world. You meet someone and you spend all your time with them and see less and less of your friends. Even if that someone is your friend’s brother, you simply can’t compete.” He still remembered the way Sara protested when he met Joe.

  * * *

  “I never see you anymore.”

  “You see me. You see me right now!” Patrick exclaimed. It had been a year since they graduated and they were sharing an apartment in New York.

  “Lucky me,” Sara said. “You must have run out of clean underwear.”

  Their Chelsea apartment was too small for arguing, which was one thing that made their living together a success. He’d even bitched to Joe on their second date that the closet where he’d kept his clothes was too narrow and he had to bend his wire hangers forty-five degrees. Joe’s jealous reply: You have a closet? Joe, a native New Yorker, was the wrong audience for his complaint.

  “Sara, I gave you the bedroom. I sleep on the couch. You can’t get mad if I want to go to Joe’s just to sleep in an actual bed.”

  “So this is about furniture.”

  “Yes. It’s about furniture. Hard. Wood. Furniture.”

  Sara threw her moccasin at him just because.

  “What was that for?”

  “Lying to me.”

  “What lie?” Patrick bent down to pick up the slipper. He ran his finger over the red and turquoise beads sewn across the vamp that made a tiny, glorious bird.

  “Oh, please. You’re not going there to sleep.” She flashed him a devilish grin and ducked just as Patrick threw her moccasin back.

  “I am!”

  “You don’t look the least bit rested.”

  Patrick glanced in the small mirror by the door. “Don’t say that. I have an audition.”

  “For what?” Sara slipped the moccasin back on her foot.

  “A play, a play. What else is there?” Patrick grabbed a script from on top of the TV. It was flipped open to his audition scene. “Run lines with me?”

  “No.”

  “Run lines with me!”

  “No.”

  “Meet him, then.”

  “Huh?”

  “Jo
e. Come out with us. Meet him. You’ll like him.”

  “I never like anyone you date.” And that was true. Sara always thought Patrick sold himself short.

  “Joe’s different.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He is!”

  “How?”

  Patrick took a step closer. He knew they were in danger of becoming codependent. That after five years of friendship he couldn’t live without her and she couldn’t live without him. If they didn’t do something about it soon, it would alter the rest of their lives. “He thinks I’m a pain in the ass, too.”

  * * *

  Patrick emerged from the memory and looked at Sara’s children, alarmed, as if they had teleported into his hot tub from another time. But when? Where? How had almost twenty years disappeared in the blink of an eye? “Your mom and I used to live together. In New York.”

  “Were you almotht our daddy?”

  “What?” Patrick swung around to Grant, nearly spilling his drink himself this time. “No. Of course not.” He and Sara had once drunkenly made out in their dorm building lounge, but it ended with both of them reduced to fits of laughter. “This was a long time ago. We had a little apartment in New York, in Chelsea. A one-bedroom, but I slept on the couch. You could do that then, find something rent-controlled in Manhattan and make it work. Nowadays I don’t know where we would live. Queens or even New Jersey.” Patrick adjusted the tub’s jets so he didn’t have to talk over them. “Want to hear about it?”

  “Yes. Was Mommy pretty?” Maisie asked.

  “Oh, very. Fashionable, too. She worked at a magazine. I don’t remember which one; not Vogue, not Cosmo . . . Marie Claire. Is that the name of a magazine or was she the first lady of France? No matter, the pay was garbage but she got a lot of free stuff. I went to auditions during the day and waited tables at night in an obscure Greek restaurant, but I was never very good at it. First of all, the consonant clusters are all fucked—t’s and z’s together? C’mon. And I never really was a people person and that was reflected in my tips, which, fortunately, I pooled with the rest of the staff’s to split at the end of the night. They didn’t like me much because of that, bringing the pool average down—but it worked out better for me. I don’t know. I wasn’t cut out for it. One night I accidentally set a woman on fire. Your mom said I came home every night smelling of lamb.” Until he met Joe and stopped coming home at all.

  “You set a woman on fire?” The look of disbelief on Maisie’s face was comical.

  “Accidentally.”

  “Accidentally?”

  “Did she burn to a kwisp?” Grant’s eyes bulged with excitement.

  “There was this dish that was served with an open flame and a woman was wearing too much hairspray, and, well . . . it was the 1990s. No one burned to a crisp. I doused her with house water.”

  “What’s house water?” Maisie asked.

  “It’s what they made us call tap water.” Maisie’s expression could best be described as confused. “Yeah, I thought it was bullshit, too.” Patrick had done enough performing to know when he was losing his audience; the looks on the kids’ faces only underscored what he could already feel. “We laughed so much, all the time. Everything was funny. That’s what I remember most about that time. Your mother had the best laugh, that rich cackle that came from the very depths of her soul. We didn’t have any money to speak of, but when we would laugh like that, in the middle of New York, when the city would do everything in its immense power to keep you down, we felt rich as kings. I miss that time. It’s cliché, I know. But I think it was the happiest time in my life.”

  Maisie’s curiosity was piqued. “Was it the happiest time in Mommy’s life?”

  “What?” Patrick looked at his niece; this time he could effortlessly read her face. “No. No. Ultimately, we were different people that way.”

  “When was her happiest time?” It was just like Maisie to worry that she might have been her mother’s regret.

  “Well, I can think of several,” Patrick began. “One, when she was pregnant with you. Although, I don’t know why. She was fat and couldn’t do anything fun and her ankles were so swollen she couldn’t stuff her feet into any fashionable shoes.” He splashed a little water Maisie’s way and she smiled. “On her wedding day. She looked radiant. You know she and your dad fought over who I would stand up for? Should I be the best man? The maid of honor?”

  “That’s a girl job.”

  “Maid of honor? No, it’s not. What do we say in this house? Boys can do girl things and girls can do boy things. That’s not even a Guncle Rule, there shouldn’t even be boy things and girl things to begin with. People should just do what they want.”

  “What did you choose?”

  “Oh. You’ve seen the pictures. I married them. It was the only way to keep the peace. I was standing up front with both of them; your father had a case of flop sweat, but your mother absolutely sparkled. Not even photos could capture it. She was really happy then. We all were.”

  “What about me?” Grant asked.

  “Oh, she was definitely happy with you. After she had a girl, she most wanted a boy. And along you came.”

  Grant beamed.

  “I remember when I first met you. She was on my case to hold the baby. ‘Hold the baby, Patrick. Hold the baby.’ Of course, I didn’t want to hold you and I told her just as much.”

  “Why not?” Grant put his hands on his hips and puffed out his chest like Superman.

  “Well, babies are dull and you never know when they’re going to spit up and I was going through a phase of wearing only Issey Miyake T-shirts and I wasn’t about to let you hurl all down the back of one of those.”

  Grant laughed.

  “I didn’t care how many more I had in a drawer back home.”

  “What about you?” Maisie asked. “When were you happiest?”

  “Me?” Patrick put his hand over his chest and feigned surprise. “Right now. In this hot tub.”

  “Really?”

  “What? NO! Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. I have a Golden Globe, for Christ’s sake. Plus, you make me cap the temperature of this hot tub at ninety-something degrees and neither of you understands sarcasm.” He took a long, slow sip of vodka and crunched on an ice cube. Two more solar lights popped on and he pointed. “I told you. I really think it was that time in New York. I didn’t know how good I had it. I didn’t know it wouldn’t last.”

  There was a long pause in conversation and Grant played with the button that controlled the tub lights. He continued to press it as the water changed from white, to blue, to red, to green, to pink, and then back to white again. Eventually he lost interest and sat down. The bubbles came up to his chin. “Do you believe in heaven?” he asked.

  “Do I . . .” Patrick had been steeling himself for a question like this since the funeral, but he hadn’t expected it to be presented so bluntly. Is Mommy in heaven? That was the tack he was expecting the question to take. Something he could answer with a single word—even if it was not reflective of his belief—and move on. But he wasn’t prepared to have to explain his faith, or lack thereof. “That’s a tough one. Do you?”

  Grant shrugged and Maisie looked equally adrift.

  “I believe she’s not in pain anymore.” Patrick squinched his eyes closed long enough not to cry. He pulled Grant onto his lap. He remembered once shooting a two-bit TV movie, the first real thing he’d ever booked, where he was supposed to cry. They had to call “Cut” while he pulled out a menthol stick to rub under his eye, an effective trick of the trade; he wouldn’t need such gimmickry now. “I believe she’s at peace. And that brings me some comfort when I’m feeling sad. Beyond that, I don’t really know.”

  “I thought grown-ups were supposed to know everything.”

  Patrick looked across the tub at his niece, where she’d taken a perch on the edge. “W
ho told you that? A grown-up, no doubt.” Maisie wore the board shorts and lycra running shirt they had selected together; Patrick bought four of each and she practically lived in them, made them her Palm Springs uniform. Her hair was dry with salt from the pool and chemicals from the hot tub and she looked like an effortlessly cool surfer. “We know some things. Not everything. Some things, the older you get the less you actually know about them.”

  “Like what?” Grant asked.

  “Like . . . I don’t know. Math. No one remembers math after high school. At least not the complicated kind.” Patrick scratched the scruff on his chin. In the summer he shaved more often than winter, but he’d been lazy the last couple days. He adjusted the jets back to medium. “Why people are so afraid, especially of other people who are different. Hate. I don’t understand why there’s so much hate in the world, but I guess that ties in with fear. That sort of thing. What do kids not understand?”

  Maisie thought about this while cupping her hands around the tub’s jets. “I don’t understand why people have to die.”

  Patrick turned off the jets entirely and let the water simmer to a placid calm. “That’s an easy one.” He turned to Grant to make sure he was listening, too. “Some people are here for a long time, and some people are only here for a short time. And none of us know. That’s the beauty of it. We don’t have any damned clue how much time we get. So. Guncle Rule number . . . Maisie, what number are we on?”

  “Eight.”

  “See what I mean about forgetting math? Guncle Rule number eight: Live your life to the fullest every single day, because every day is a gift. That’s why people die. To teach us the importance of living.” Again, Patrick made a face to keep from crying. Not for Sara this time; for himself. He had broken this rule. Over and over again. He reached out for the button that controlled the tub’s lights and cycled through the rainbow of colors. For years he’d convinced himself he hadn’t, that he was in fact living large. First with the show, and then in the desert—buying a home in a neighborhood with a magical name like Movie Colony, of all things, eschewing work and responsibility altogether. But he wasn’t living, he was hiding. From people. From friends. From family. From love. From work. From art. From contributing. From everything that mattered.