Monthly Story (November, '24): Another Little Somebody

fiction

At the top of the hill, I decided not to take the steep, paved way down Tucker’s Mountain to the river. Further on—past the elementary school, the township buildings, and the new, unfamiliar houses—there had been a dirt road through the woods. Winding and narrow. The “back way,” we’d called it. One of those short cuts that probably takes longer because of all the turns and the roughness of the road—but prettier. It took you to the river below Henry’s Ferry, where I’d reserved a room at the Sunfish Inn. There since 1746, they soaked you for rooms. “Quaint” is what the tourist books said, a euphemism for outrageously expensive. But I’d known the place all my life and wanted to show my granddaughter where my part of her family came from.

We made the turn. I stiffened to find the first section of what used to be dirt newly paved past what was still a sheep farm, but relaxed when that abruptly ended and we were kicking up dust as we passed into thick forest. They hadn’t “developed” the woods, thank goodness. No new houses had sprung out of the mushroom spores. “We used to ride our bikes up and down this road in summer,” I said. We bumped over a rough spot, slowly steered around a sharp turn. “My brother and I.”

A mile or so later I remembered a short cut off the short cut and turned onto a grassy track, eased down the side of the gorge and up the other until we dropped again and nosed out onto Canal Road. From there it was maybe a mile to Henry’s Ferry and a warm shower, then lunch on the terrace at the inn. A long day, I thought. Jockying with the freeway to O’Hare, boarding, adjusting and readjusting leg room, “deplaning” like cattle, then finding the rental car. Another line doing that. More traffic. The drive.

Travel days, I always wonder why I bother.

“The show is tonight, right?” said Emily as we came into Henry’s Ferry.

“You know it is,” I said.

“And we’ll meet the woman he lived with? The one he stopped drinking with?”

“I assume she’ll be there,” I told her. “But these people are old. They may not get out so easily anymore. Your Great Gran’ll be there.”

“Are you excited?” she asked me. “You know. Your Uncle Willy finally getting his recognition.” A third year student of art history at Northwestern, she was big on artists’ recognition.

“Too late, though,” I said

My Uncle Willy finally the man of the hour. I had to stop and try wrapping my head around that since I’d gotten the phone call about the show. I’d told Emily about him, about how he’d been when I was a kid.

Gilbert, my step-dad, referred to him as “that ne’re-do-well beatnik,” but, as uncles go, I thought Willy near perfection. My real father’s little brother. He used to show up, always unannounced, in his ’47 Chevy pickup with his guitar, and it was like the circus didn’t just come to town, but had come to my house and I was the ringmaster’s favorite kid. Somehow I left my older brother Sam out of this fantasy. I was the favorite. When the other kids in tiny Frankstown saw Willy’s truck coming, they started gravitating toward it like metal shavings to a magnet.

It didn't take long before we begged him to take out his guitar and the kazoo he called his “real instrument.” He bragged that he once played a kazoo concert at Carnegie Hall, though later, when I remembered the dodgy expression on his face as he told us about that, I figured it must have been on the sidewalk outside the building. That was Willy’s kind of joke.

“Okay, what do you want to hear?” he’d ask as he dangled his cowboy boots off the back of the truck tuning the six-string. We kids were too little to know how cliché the whole shtick was, but I was proud of my lean, tanned young uncle—a cowboy, not a beatnik. Everybody knew beatniks don’t ride horses. Uncle Willy rode horses in Texas. And he seemed always to be introducing us to another pretty young woman through a slightly embarrassed, snaggle-toothed grin.

My friends and I begged for “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” “The Monkey and the Engineer,” and “The Fox and the Goose,” and Willy gladly obliged. For a while he used to show up with a girlfriend who made puppets, and they performed Narnia-inspired stories from a garishly painted wooden theatre set up on the back of the truck. We had to line up to get “tickets” for the show—which were quick little cartoon drawings my uncle created on the spot for each of us, then we had to get back into line and give the tickets back to him. “This show is NOT free!” he’d yell. “You have to pay! We have bills! So many bills!” Having sold and then collected our “tickets,” he’d walk through the little crowd of kids giving out “programs,” the cartoons he’d just drawn, given out, and then collected. It was the sort of madness we loved, and I remember keeping mine in my bedroom desk drawer for years. Dragons wearing berets and hip boots, buck-toothed cats with impossibly long necks, bearded old men in bath robes and bare feet. All drawn in seconds. No two alike.  

When the show began, Willy stood down on the ground doing the music with his kazoo and guitar while talking to us as a narrator and to her puppets as a character in the play. My buddy Herbie said Willy should be on television and that he’d be famous some day. It was pretty thrilling, but his girlfriends never lasted long. The puppets only lasted the summer I was nine, 1959, never to return, though he continued to fill our ears and imaginations with songs and tall tales and family stories.

He was full of stories. Willy’s father, my father’s father, rescued a legendary Uncle Stan from a firing squad in China in the Thirties. As the story passed down to Willy, nobody ever explained what Great Uncle Stan was doing in China or why they wanted to shoot him. Was it the Nationalists, the Communists? Nobody ever addressed any of that. For all Willy knew, it was the invading Japanese. How my grandfather rescued Great Uncle Stan or what he was doing in China nobody ever explained either. Those fragments stirred us up for more, and there was always more. Like the story of Uncle Stan going to sea as a merchant marine and jumping ship in Buenos Aires, then learning to dance tango and marrying—and then deserting—a woman there. The last anyone ever heard of him he had gone hiking in the Himalayas. When I heard all that, I had a list of words to look up in the set of encyclopedias on the living room book shelf. Buenos Aires. The Himalayan Mountains. Tango. “The point is,” Willy told me more than once, “that you don’t have to live like the little robot they all want you to be.” He spread his arms, ready to embrace the universe. “It’s a big world out there, kiddo. You can chart your own course—or not.”

I used to lay awake at night thinking about those places and the pictures I had seen in the encyclopedia. It all seemed vaguely terrifying.

And, like that summer of 1959, Willy could do a fantastic vanishing act. The truck, which I remember having broken down and left him stranded somewhere in the North Carolina boonies, was replaced by a series of less distinctive vehicles. His visits became less frequent, and eventually nobody asked him to take out his guitar. My life revolved around school, baseball, and Scouts. Gilbert, my step-dad, enrolled us in those last two. He coached the Little League team and quickly took over as scoutmaster from the well-meaning old minister at the sponsoring church. As I thought about it much, much later, I had to sort of give him credit. He was trying hard to be our father, and he did leave his mark. But he had a rough, needy edge, too. Any time Willy did appear, Gilbert lured him into whatever neighborhood ballgame he could rustle up, though he knew Willy never liked anything you had to keep score at. Willy’s reputation was for singing and storytelling and for drawing those crazy cartoons. He pretty quickly tired of ball games. He’d lose track of the runs or where the play was, and my step-dad wasted no time in yelling across the field to remind him.

“Back up, Willy! This one might be coming your way! See what you can do with it this time.” It was a reminder to everybody of who was in charge. The worst times came when Willy tried to give some poor little squirt a couple extra swings of the bat. “No way,” my step-dad yelled. “Field rules. He has to learn.” Everybody knew whose field rules they were.

Apparently, that time Willy’s truck stranded him in North Carolina was when he took up painting again. My mother told me he’d been a stand out as a teenager and could have gone to art school if his family had agreed. They didn’t. Even my father, his older brother, thought it a waste of money. My father got a business degree on the G.I. Bill. Willy had been too young for the war but was drafted during Korea, though luckily they never sent him there. Left him in Texas for some reason.

After the call about his show came, I’d told all that to Emily, who was staying with us. I left out the part about his speech on the big, wide world and how we could choose whatever life we wanted, thinking she’d figure I chose “or not.” Then I tried to explain the other part. The part about the time we worked together, after I’d finished college and didn’t know what I wanted to do. Willy had been teaching art somewhere in New Jersey, but then lost the job, so moved back into the house on Oakwis Creek where he’d grown up. When I came home from college, he was doing contracting and took me on as his helper. I’d seen little of him through high school and not at all during college.

"Fact is I'm glad you came along, Kevin,” he told me. “Your mom might have told you. I’ve been mooning around out here for a few weeks." He was using up a good deal of energy not looking at me. "Love," he said. "It's a bitch. Not the woman I'm thinking of. Love itself." He picked up a gin bottle, Gilby's, and held it out at arm’s length to squint through the glass. "I had my heart busted."

He’d somehow gotten involved with a much younger woman, younger even than myself, had fallen hard, but then, predictably, she dumped him. Looking at him—unshaven, tossle-headed, heading to flabby—I couldn’t imagine how he’d ever finagled to get to first base. In his depression, he’d stopped looking for work and what work he had dried up.

"He’s in a bad place these days," my mother advised in the kitchen later that night. “He needs a steady hand to get back on track. Don’t judge him. He’s a dreamer.”

Gilbert came in from the living room. “Yeah. Oh, he thinks he’s something, all right. Look at him, though. That’s what comes of doing whatever you damned well just please.” He shook his head. “Watch yourself or he’ll make you his new drinking buddy.”

My mother sighed and smiled. Bit her lip. “Gilbert tries too hard sometimes,” she said as I headed up to bed. “Don’t hold it against him.”

I found a small remodeling job through a high school friend I ran into at the grocery store. On a whim, I lied that Willy and I were super busy doing remodeling/handyman jobs. The acquaintance wrote his aunt’s phone number down on the torn corner of an envelope. “I know she’s been looking for someone,” he said. 

That scrap of paper gave us our first job.

After Willy made a phone call to the aunt, we climbed into the red Datsun pick-up he was driving at the time and went to look at the job. The aunt lived in a 19th-century gingerbread with hardwood floors and lots of fine workmanship. She wanted the thresholds raised on each of the three outer doors and an assortment of other minor fixes around the house.

She offered us sticky buns right out of the oven and cups of coffee. Willy rubbed his mitts together. "Oh, boy! Smell that cinnamon!” It emerged that she was a great admirer of Broadway musicals and, surprise, Willy, waltzing in circles around the kitchen with a sticky bun in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, sang snatches of “I Could Have Danced All Night.” Here was the old Uncle Willy, always the entertainer, that I had hoped to find. My efforts, I told myself, had lifted Willy out of his doldrums.

We would start the job on Monday, Willy told her. He mentioned that we had another job, two actually, to finish up before we could start, but that the aunt’s job would be our priority come Monday. "We can wrap up that cabinet installment over the weekend, don't you think?" he wondered aloud.

I played along. "Yeah. At the latest, Sunday afternoon."

“Well?” Willy said as we drove away. “How’d you like how I handled the old bird?”

No hardened sales guy had anything to teach my Uncle Willy about sucking up to a client. Willy guffawed and stuck out his hand to shake across the front seat. “Now to go home and have a nice dinner and a bottle of wine,” he said.

I called home and let my mother know I'd be having dinner with Uncle Willy. We were on a roll, I told her. We shared that bottle of wine and then another, which became the pattern. We weren’t connoisseurs. An inexpensive, middling bottle did all we wanted. It relaxed the mind and loosened the tongue, made the hours pass pleasantly over the next weeks.

“I remember that old man you told me about up in the attic,” Willy said one night. “When you were just a wee little grasshopper. The ghost.”

I pretended not to remember.

“Oh, you remember all right,” said Willy. “I bet that was old Uncle Stan. The infamous, wandering crazy uncle. My patron saint. I have a picture of him here someplace.” He went to find it.

But Willy was too drunk to find the photo and never mentioned it again.

Every evening with Willy he drank gin and prepared dinner—red meat, potatoes mashed or baked, a green vegetable, and red wine. We ate at a long table on the screened-in porch overlooking the creek that ran through his woods. He liked reminding me that this was the house that he and my father had grown up in. “Your grandfather grew up here, too,” he told me more than once. After dinner he cleaned up the dishes and took a nap. Then it was out to the bar, where he threw money around, mostly to whichever attractive woman showed an interest. And it mostly worked. In spite of making a fool of himself and being regularly shot down, he hooked up.

“Watch and learn,” he grinned as he made his moves. “Watch and learn.”

I didn’t move in with him exactly, but showed up at Willy’s every morning at seven, rode out to the job with him, usually ate dinner at his place, then late at night drove home and tiptoed up the stairs to my room. Closed the door with a whisper. My step-dad, as usual, had it about right. I became Willy’s drinking buddy and loved nothing better than to sit and listen to him talk. He was the grown-up version of the old Uncle Willy I’d always wanted to meet.

“Your dad and I,” began many of his stories. “Your dad and I used to drive up to the Poconos and tramp around, go off trail. This is before all the super-light equipment you have these days. Army surplus. That was after he came back from France. I was too young, but he just seemed to have this itch and he’d say, ’Come on, we’ll drive, have ourselves a time.’ I was just a kid. It was pretty wonderful having a big brother who would take me on like that. Such a good guy. He had a one-armed buddy from their time in the war who had horses, so a couple of times we stayed with him down in Virginia. Then, of course, he and your mother got serious, though I saw her first. Too old for me, I guess. Remember that next time that husband of hers wants to throw me out. I saw her first.”

It turned out he had a set pattern to the workday as well as the evening. We arrived on the job at seven-thirty sharp in the red Datsun and worked until a little before noon. Then we climbed into the truck and drove home, where Willy drank a beer as he threw lunch together. I was never invited either to help with food preparation or to have a drink. Instead, I found a comfortable spot where I could keep an eye out for his dog, Tracker. A mean piece of work. Never warmed up to me. After lunch, Willy cleaned up the dishes. Then he held a second beer between his knees as we roared back to the job. He always drove.

The two beer lunch did nothing to improve his skills. On that first job, he ruined a beautiful maple threshold through drunken afternoon clumsiness and insisted I nail a board to a bathroom wall where some other way of putting up a towel rack would have worked better. The walls in that old house were bowed, so trying to wrap a stiff one-by-eight around any of them made no sense.

“Just get it done,” Willy snarled when I pointed out the problem.

Stupidly, I made an effort, but everything I tried chipped sheets of paint off the wall and shed splinters of flakey plaster around the craters the nails dug. The aunt took a look at what I was doing and held a quick conference with Willy.

“Whatever possessed you to do this?” Willy scolded as the aunt stood at his elbow scowling in disbelief.

I knew better than to defend myself. The old aunt was no fool. That night she called just as we were sitting down to dinner—a quick call.

“We’re finished with that job,” Willy said as he came back to the table. “I have something different for us next week.” Neither of us ever mentioned the incident again, though I figured the aunt had, in addition to noting my incompetence, probably detected those two beers and the busted threshold.

Ashamed of my weakness, I never mentioned the incident to anyone. It became the marinade in which the near future floated.

One Monday morning on a different job, after doing some preliminary odds and ends, we spread a huge sheet of clear plastic over the floor and onto the end of the king sized bed in a garden level bedroom. The client wanted a sliding-glass door installed. A walk-out to his patio. After lunch and a couple of beers, Willy handed me a sledge hammer and told me to bust through the cinderblock wall while he went off to do some more of what the guy wanted.

I set to work steadily through the afternoon, wondering what had happened to him—until finally turning around and finding Willy passed out and spread eagle on the bed. I left him there, finished the opening, taped the clear plastic sheet over it, swept up the mess, and loaded the tools onto the truck. Then I shook him awake. “I’ll drive,” I said, holding out my hand for the keys.

“The hell you will,” Willy said. He opened the driver’s side door and got in. The truck had already started rolling as I hopped aboard.

That night we hit Apple Jack's as usual, and Willy managed to go to bed with a woman twenty years younger than himself in tight blue jeans. In the semi-light of the bar, I made out the pink bra under her white blouse. Slightly over ripe. I sat nursing a beer and wondering what she saw in this shabby guy who half the women in the place had already laughed off. Then I felt a presence over my shoulder. I turned to be face-to-face with one of those laughing young women. “Very impressive,” she sneered, motioning toward the dancing couple. “You stay with him. He’ll show you how it’s done.” Then she was gone and I could feel my cheeks flush.  

“I can’t understand why you never get laid,” Willy wondered the next morning on the job. “You’re young. I don’t get it. I always thought you’d be more fun.”

I didn’t try to laugh that off. I wanted him to see how pissed I was, but he never noticed. 

And despite the screw-ups, we kept getting jobs and somehow finishing them. And we kept hitting Apple Jack's every night. Willy went through women in a week or two, always closing the deal with his guitar, which he otherwise ignored. I knew when to excuse myself and go home to my old bedroom, but I watched as their eyes widened listening to Willy’s sad songs and funny patter. Each one of them, for that brief moment, was the love of Willy’s life. If Margie or June or Andrea loved Scrabble, they played Scrabble all weekend. If she loved dogs, they went out together and bought a dog, though Willy already had Tracker. If Tracker didn’t eat the new dog, it went back to the pound just as soon as the woman exited. For all I knew, she went to the pound, too. She disappeared so suddenly and so completely that I imagined Willy knew of a society that took in discarded girlfriends and found them new homes.

I never could do the pick-up thing. Not that I wouldn’t have if I’d had that sort of confidence. Unable to risk rejection and embarrassed by my uncle’s shamelessness, I adopted a superior attitude and withdrew into silence. Willy’s partner in the pickup trade was a muscular young guy named Eddie, an unemployed coder. He had the aptitude I clearly lacked. “Eddie’s gonna join us on this next job,” Willy announced. “There’s gonna be enough work for all of us.”

So we took Eddie onto the crew. Now the three of us cruised back and forth to our jobs in the red Datsun. I rode in the back with the tools while Willy and Eddie yucked it up in the cab. I began counting up my grievances.

Still, when the rotten apple fell out of the tree, I was surprised. We were going strong since taking Eddie on. As we completed a job, one of us came up with the next. Eddie came up with a simple roofing job on a shed. Willy talked one of his girlfriends into replacing all the tiling in her bathroom—both floor and wall tile. Another of his conquests wanted her hardwood floors sanded and polished. We built an elaborate deck and gazebo that kept us working for two solid weeks, a dock on a private lake. We were doing so well that I managed to move out of my mother’s place. True, it was only an attic apartment in one of the old houses in Henry's Ferry, but it was at last my own space.

So when Willy called to say a buddy wanted his house completely gutted and remodeled, I couldn’t figure out why I was being cut out of the deal.

“What do you mean it’s a one-man job?” I tried not to whine.

“Well, what do you care?” Willy shot back, his tone wounded. “You’re talking about finding another job anyhow. Using your degree, you said.”

That had somehow remained in the theoretical realm, though. The point was, right now we were supposedly working together. Eddie would eventually find another coding job, and it would be the two of us again. That was the main thing.

“The job’s bigger than most of what we’ve done.”

I had never argued since we started working together. Even that time Willy laid the towel rack mess on me I hadn't shown the least disrespect, and then, too, I’d gotten Willy going again in the first place. I felt proud of that and slightly annoyed that Willy had never acknowledged the boost I’d given him. I didn’t like the defensive, accusatory tone Willy was taking either, so I spoke up. “Uncle Willy,” I said, “what’s the real story here?”

He sighed at the other end of the line. “The story here,” he began, “is that the job is in Seattle and I’m going out there to do it. You get to stay in my place—the very house your dad and I grew up in, remember—you get to stay in my place while I’m gone and while you start something new. I hate to tell you this, kid, but you ain’t much of a craftsman. You might just think about reinventing yourself. You give me a little rent and we’ll figure things out when I come back.”

He said this as if everything were settled. Now I listened as Willy rambled on about how he and his buddy would bach it together in the house as they did the work. That meant a six-month party for sure. Then one fine day, most likely right out of the blue, my dependable old Uncle Willy, true to form, would be ready to reclaim his place. Where would I be then? Moving back in with my mother and Gilbert, if Gilbert would stand for it, of course.

Willy suddenly turned cheerful. “You and Tracker will have a grand old time.” 

“You aren’t taking him?”

“Be reasonable, kid. How am I going to do a job like this with him around?”

“Willy, Tracker doesn’t even like me.”

He laughed. “Uncle Willy, and you never did have a way with dogs, did you?  Well, now’s your chance to fix all that. The two of you will bond in a week or we aren’t related.”

“No,” I said.

“No? What do you mean ‘No’?”

“Get Eddie to do it.”

“Eddie has a place.”

 “So do I.”

“You don’t understand, Kevin. I’m offering you a chance to get out of that rat hole of yours. Hell, you’ll probably eventually get that house. I’m not going to live forever.”

I added it all up. I’d have to find a new job as soon as Willy left, I’d have to move and take care of a dog that didn’t like me, had once even bitten me, and for this I’d have to pay rent, not be paid, and then when Willy came home, I’d have to move again. I was a long way from caring if I owned that house, or any other.

“You just think you’re going to take advantage of me,” I laughed.

“What are you talking about, boy?”

“I think you know, and I’m not interested. Either take Tracker with you or ask Eddie. He’s your good buddy, not mine.”

“Now, come on!”

But I had already hung up.

That’s a story I only outlined for Emily. She didn’t need to hear all the bloody details. His deserting me like that set me in motion, though, got me going. I put on a dark suit and sat for interviews down in Philly, landed a job, and climbed up to the Chicago office, where I was mentored by a different sort of man. I’m not sure he was better. Eventually, I met my wife and raised a family. Emily was the oldest of the grandchildren. I suppose Willy would have thought I’d become the little robot Gilbert wanted me to become. My mother kept tabs on him and reported to me in bread crumbs. He’d returned to teaching art and still lived in the Oakwis Creek house, not a mile from the Sunfish Inn. And had stopped drinking. She wanted me to understand that. But I’d turned my back. When he died, I stubbornly declined to go back East for the funeral, though I felt pangs of regret and an old longing for months afterward.

Then David Stern, who I’d never heard of, called me. Emily knew who he was. She knew his work from a course at Northwestern. He’d been Willy’s student in high school and couldn’t stop going on and on about what a wonderful, inspiring art teacher my uncle had been.

“Your uncle was full of stories of the Pennsylvania Impressionists. Adored them. Edward Redfield and George Sotter and the others, their feuds and foibles. He had this system of teaching painting. I’ve never seen anyone get beginners started on a painting the way he did. Kind of a wild man, too, actually. He loved to take us outside to work, and he made me believe in myself as an artist. I’m not the only one he taught who has had a career.”

You get the idea. Stern loved Uncle Willy, who, after all, I guess got him going, too. As I listened to him go on and on about how he’d somehow gotten the better part of my uncle, I found myself sucking in my lips, taking a giant breath to not rudely cut him off. He couldn’t know Willy the way I did. When he learned Willy had died, he did some detective work and contacted Ava, the woman Willy lived with. That’s when he heard about the paintings in the attic and got an idea.

“She said he’d always taken a weekend day during the school year and almost every day in summer to paint, often outside,” Stern told me. “Sort of a Sunday Painter. Landscapes mostly. She said come and look at the paintings. They’re all up in the attic. He painted them not caring. Never tried to sell. He just wanted to make them, but she said she always understood that he dreamed someday people would see what he had become. How about that? He was never a careerist. Can you imagine?”

I didn’t say anything to that.

“There are a dozen or so worthy of a show,” he said. “Ava gave me a list of family members I should contact. It’s a pretty short list. Your mother is coming, but she says her husband is probably too frail and that it’s a long way for you.”

“Yes, it is,” I said. “I’m pretty busy these days.”

“Well, yeah,” he said and paused. “It’s a shame, though.” Then, gathering himself, “Ava said there was something between you two. He tried to contact you, but you never responded? I didn’t ask.”

Which struck me as pretty nervy, putting his thumb on me like that. He wanted lots of people at the opening of the show he’d organized. Feathers in his bonnet, I supposed. Fair enough. “Look who came all the way from Chicago!” That kind of thing. A careerist himself. Takes one to know one. “Let me think about it,” I said. “I have to look at my schedule.” No matter how generous I knew this gesture to his old teacher was, I found myself uncomfortably annoyed, surprised I felt such ownership of Willy.

And my schedule? The fact is I’m retired now. Mostly what I do with my schedule is drive up to Michigan’s Northern Peninsula to our cabin. “My contemplative retirement,” I call it. I don’t fish. I don’t golf. I take walks and I read on the patio overlooking the lake. And we’re far off the hardtop.

“Who was that?” my wife asked when I got off the phone. Emily sat with her books at the dining table. She watched my face, which doesn’t lie. I knew I had to try explaining it to her and that it would end up with our going back to Pennsylvania, oddly glad my uncle would get his fifteen minutes of fame.

So there we were, sitting on the terrace at the Sunfish Inn, not a mile from the house where Uncle Willy and I had run our little contracting enterprise. “It’s all so beautiful here,” said Emily, abstracted as she took in the footbridge and the swirling currents and eddies of the low running river. We shared a large slice of tomato basil quiche. She’d taken out her sketch pad and color pencils and had the footbridge pretty much nailed. “Don’t forget to eat,” I said, but she ignored me with an, “Oh, Grandad.” I followed her gaze from the bridge to the trees along the far riverbank. The rocks around the footbridge’s pilings and along the New Jersey side bleached white in the August sun. I remembered riding my bike down to the river with my brother once when we were ten or so, throwing rocks and pulling all sorts of debris out of the current. A playhouse floated by. “Wow!” he yelled. “Everything ends up in this river!”

I shook my head out of this memory and ordered a clarita, knowing I’d need to explain what that was. It was a stupid little game I played. Beer and lemon aide. “Oh, you mean a summer shandy,” the server ended up saying. “Yeah, Clarita!” I told him. “That’s what they call it in Spain.” Like I’m some kind of world traveler. Some free spirit. Another Willy or Stan. A crazy uncle.

Emily groaned and shook her head. Unbelievable, that shake meant. He’s doing it again!

Our server condescended to give us half a smile.

“I think I’d like to live here after graduation,” Emily said after he’d gone away. “Maybe GreatGran would put me up while I get started.”

“She’d like that, Emily,” I said, but I knew my mother wouldn’t be around much longer.

I drove Emily by the Oakwis Creek house after lunch, but didn’t stop. Ava, who still lived there, came along after my time. I gather they’d been happy. I hope so, but we could wait to meet her at the opening. Eventually, her daughter would get the house, not me. We had dinner with my mother and Gilbert that evening. When Emily, who loved her major in art history, let on how excited she was to see her Great Uncle Willy’s paintings and actually meet David Stern, Gilbert treated her to a bit of his curdled wisdom. “Art, honey, is a good way to go nowhere fast, to be just another little nobody.”

I smiled because my son had brought her up so well that she knew not to argue with the old poop. As hard as he’d tried, he could never have been my father, and Willy, who could have, had stumbled in his effort—if that’s what it had been. My mother only wore that pained, tightlipped smile we grew up knowing. She glanced over at Gilbert, slumping in his chair, and then at Emily, sitting next to her. “We’re all somebody’s little somebody,” she said, “even that silly boy was.” Then she took Emily’s hand and, reaching across the table, mine. She closed her eyes, as if remembering, and squeezed both our hands so that we heard all that she left unsaid.