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My lolling about on the porch swing in the cold, making no effort to leave the house, seemed to disturb Aunt Jettie. “Is this sudden lean toward shiftlessness linked to all the time you’ve been spending with Dick?” Aunt Jettie said, in a tone that sounded eerily like Grandma Ruthie.
“Actually, Dick hasn’t wanted to spend much time with me lately, Aunt Jettie. We had an argument and he’s pretty irritated with me.”
“Is that why he’s coming up the drive?” She pointed to the driveway, where a battered El Camino was cutting through the dust. Dick climbed out of the car without making eye contact. He slinked up the porch steps and took a seat beside me. I closed my book and waited.
“Am I supposed to talk first?”
“Give me a minute.” He cut me off with a slicing gesture.
We sat in silence, with me staring into the distance, wondering what to do with my hands. Finally, he said, “I’ve been scared to say anything to Gilbert because I didn’t want him to be afraid of me or to turn away from me. It’s one thing to read about vampires and ghosts, it’s another to find out that you’re related to one.”
He studied the creases on his jeans. Unsure of my place in this exchange, I sat and waited.
“I knew Eugenia had the baby. My parents paid to keep her away while she was pregnant. When she had him, most of the town whispered about him being mine, but I didn’t do anything about it. I knew my parents were sending her money every month, and I figured that was all she needed from me. Don’t make that face at me, Jane. I was young and mortal … and stupid. I was sent away to handle some contrived piece of family business, and by the time I came back, my parents had sent the baby to an orphanage over in Murphy. They wouldn’t hear of bringing him to our home. The scandal, they said, the shame—even though I know for a fact my Daddy had several scandals of his own growing up around town. And then my parents died, and I lost the house to the jackass—”
“Gabriel,” I corrected.
“Right,” he said. “I told myself Albert was better off living at the orphanage, in a safe place, instead of bouncing around with me, living off card games, sleeping in a fine hotel one night and a ditch the next. That was just an excuse, of course. I didn’t know anything about kids. I wouldn’t have known what to do with him if I’d had him. I was a terrible father but a fun uncle. I’d visit Albert, give him penny candy and whatever money I could scrape together. But as soon as it came to real problems, the kid getting sick, getting into trouble at school, I was out of there.”
He grimaced. “When I got turned, I realized I shouldn’t be around him. It would be too confusing for him, a mysterious uncle who never aged and only visited at night. I was a piss-poor role model, anyway. And the people I did business with, they wouldn’t have minded roughing up a little boy to make a point. I stopped showing up for visits, and he ran away a couple of months later.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Part of me was almost relieved,” he admitted. “I didn’t have to worry. I didn’t have to bother. And then he came back, full-grown and the spitting image of me, especially in some of his less legal habits. And it was … nice. It was nice to be able to watch him, to see him running his business, being a man. I couldn’t always agree with some of his decisions, but at that point, I was supposed to be about sixty years old and still looked thirty something. I couldn’t exactly come back to give him a spanking and fatherly advice. He married, had a son. His son married, had a son. And I watched over them, all of them, watched them live their lives, enjoy their successes, make their mistakes. And most of their mistakes were a lot like mine. It’s sort of the Cheney family curse.”
“Good with women, bad with money?” I suggested.
He shrugged and smiled. “I never made contact,” he said. “I was still hanging around with the same type of people, and the less likely they were to connect me to the family, the better. I couldn’t stand it if any of them got hurt because of me. I thought I’d gotten rid of the paper trail when I set the fire in the courthouse.”
“Why do you tell me these things?” I huffed. “You know I have a Girl Scout complex.”
“I never made contact with them,” he said, ignoring me. “Not until Gilbert.”
“Why Gilbert?”
“He was the first in our family who looked like he might amount to something. He was such a good boy, and in a sincere way. He honestly cared about his mother, his little sister, his classmates at school, his country. He was one of the first boys in the Hollow to sign up for the Army after Pearl Harbor. He was the first man in our family to start college, much less finish it.” Dick smiled proudly. “And his sister was a sweet girl, just a little, well, stupid. But she was the first girl born to the family in about five generations, so she was special, too.
“When their father died and his mother was having trouble making ends meet, I came forward. Just knocked on the door one night. I didn’t tell her who I was exactly, just a distant cousin who was interested in making sure the family was well taken care of. I think she knew there was something not quite right about me, especially when I told her I didn’t want to meet the kids or tell them I was helping them. But she was too happy to accept my money to say anything.”
“I always got the impression that you were lucky to take care of yourself. How’d you support a family?” I asked.
“I have ways of making extra money when I need it,” he said, slightly offended. “When Gilbert needed money for graduate school, I sold a kidney on the black market for tuition.”
“We can grow those back?” I asked.
“It wasn’t my kidney.”
“And now we’re back to the disturbing territory I’m comfortable with.” I snorted. “So, you’re a family man, a loving patriarch. In essence, you’re a total fraud.”
He looked chastened. “Don’t tell anybody.”
“Are you going to tell him? I think it would mean a lot to Mr. Wainwright to know he has some family left.”
“What am I supposed to do? Come barreling into the store and shout, ‘Hey, pal, wanna go outside and play catch with Grandpa?’ “
I shrugged. “Well, you might want to work your way up to catch. He does have that bad hip. You should at least think about telling him. What have you got to lose?”
Dick tucked his canines over his bottom lip. All pretense, all of the smug self-assurance, fell away as he said, “What if he’s ashamed of me?”
