The Uncle Who Chose Her Instead

I want to tell you what those six days were like, because I think about them more than almost anything else from that whole year.

Everett did not ask me to explain myself. He did not ask what I had done to deserve getting put out, which was the question everyone else in that family would have led with. He made coffee strong enough to strip paint, the same way every morning, in a percolator older than I was, and he handed me a cup without a word and let me sit at his workbench and watch him rebuild a carburetor while the radio played whatever the local AM station was playing, usually the wheat report or a ballgame out of Spokane.

He had taught me how to use that same workbench when I was fourteen. Not because anyone assigned it, but because I used to ride my bike out there most summer afternoons to get away from the house, and Everett, rather than shooing me off, handed me a rag and told me to hold this steady, and one small task became a hundred small tasks over a decade, until I could gap a spark plug and true up a mower blade and weld a clean bead without thinking twice about any of it. My father used to say the shop was a waste of a Saturday. Everett used to say a trade was the one thing nobody could ever repossess.

Those six days, we mostly worked in a comfortable quiet. He asked once, on the fourth night, over a plate of the beans and cornbread he made because it was the only thing he knew how to cook, whether I was doing all right. I said I didn’t know yet. He nodded like that was a perfectly reasonable answer, and he did not push it further.

On the sixth morning I came down the outside stairs and found the shop dark and the door still locked, which had never once happened in all the years I had known him. I found him in the chair behind the counter, like he had sat down for a minute and simply not gotten back up. The county coroner said later it was his heart, quick, and that he likely never knew it was happening.

I called my father from the shop’s front counter, because someone in that family had to know, and because whatever else was broken between us, Everett had still been his uncle. He was quiet on the phone for a moment, then asked, in a voice I could not read at all, whether I was doing all right out there. It was the first thing resembling a kind question he had asked me in longer than I could remember, and for one brief, foolish moment, standing there with the receiver against my ear and my eyes still swollen, I let myself believe something in our family might actually shift because of it.

It did not take him long to show me otherwise.