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“Have something,” I said as I forced down my first bite of eggs. It wasn’t the most pleasant feeling, swallowing solid food, but it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting either, especially after the throat spray.
“He made me some of everything that’s here,” Cato admitted, taking out his own eggs.
“This is good,” I said, pointing my fork at the eggs. We finished eating mostly in silence as I had to keep washing down the eggs with a cold drink to ease the soreness.
Then Cato brushed me off to relax while he put the rest of the food away for later, coming back with the ice cream I requested to tell this story.
“So you know how I told you my mom is a psycho and my dad was always absent?” I started after Cato thawed my ice cream while I did a quick whore’s bath and changed into a fresh tee and panties. I tried to put shorts on, but got frustrated with the bandages and just went without.
“Yeah.”
“Well, I did have someone else in my life growing up.” Albeit not for as long as I would have liked.
“Yeah? Grandparent?” he asked.
“Uncle,” I corrected. “He was older than my mom and absent a lot of my young childhood because he was… stationed overseas.”
“Stationed. In the military?”
“Actually, ah, the CIA.”
“Your uncle was a spy?” he asked, catching on quick.
That wasn’t exactly something I knew right away.
All I knew at first was that he was coming back to Miami, and that my mom was actually cleaning the house and cooking a meal to have him over.
And since I spent most of my childhood eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as my dinner and junk food for the rest of my meals, this was a pretty big deal for me.
If I really gave it thought, I could probably only pinpoint half a dozen times my mother had cooked over the course of my childhood. And most of those times were because she was having one of her many boyfriends over for dinner, trying to impress them, make them believe she would be a great wife to them someday.
I didn’t get to eat at the table during those meals, of course, but there were leftovers that I could heat up to eat after she and her boyfriend of the week were locked in my mom’s room.
So, yeah, the fact that my mom was actually standing in the kitchen all day, slicing and dicing and frying and baking, it felt like a huge deal. Like someone really important was coming to dinner.
The weird thing was, she never really even talked about my uncle much. When I, a curious kid wondering why our family was so small, would ask about her relatives, she would mention she had a brother, but hadn’t seen him in years.
At the time, I figured maybe he was in a home like my grandparents were. We’d visited them occasionally, my mom chain-smoking in the car on the way there, her body taut and fidgety.
It was clear that the relationships she had with her parents were… strained. All they did was bicker when they visited, though they’d been nice to me, handing me sugar-free candy out of their nightstands, and telling how pretty and smart I was. Even though they couldn’t have possibly known if I was smart since I’d never spent any time with them.
“No, stupid,” my mom had said when I mentioned that, rolling her eyes at me. “He’s not old enough to be in a nursing home.”
Which was not something I understood yet at eight years old. But I filed that information away.
I was ushered into my room when the buzzer announced that my uncle had arrived. I thought that was where I’d be forced to stay, my belly grumbling, my ear pressed to the door, shamelessly eavesdropping.
But the third thing my uncle said when he came in, after greeting my mom, and telling her the food smelled great, was inquiring about me.
“Where’s the little ankle-biter?” he’d asked.
My mom sighed, then called out my name.
“Oh, look at you. Haven’t been biting ankles in a while, huh?” he’d asked, nodding at me.
My uncle was a tall, thin man. No beard, no tattoos. Dark brown hair cut in a very plain style. Eyes a mix of green and brown I would later learn to call ‘hazel.’
Everything about him was… nondescript. You couldn’t pick him out of a crowd.
