The Uncle They Were Ashamed Of

For fifteen years I was the name my family forgot on purpose. Then a man they were ashamed of died, and for one afternoon at a lake house in northern Indiana, every one of them remembered exactly who I was.

I want to tell it the way it happened, because the version my sister put on the internet is a lie, and I am done being quiet enough to let a lie stand.

My name is Gail. I am fifty years old. I grew up in a town called Millhaven, which is the kind of place where the water tower still has the high school mascot painted on it and everybody knows whose truck is parked where. My mother, Eileen, raised three of us in a two-story house off the county road, and from the time I was small she had already decided which of her children were the easy ones and which one was going to be work.

I was the work.

I was not loud. I was not sick. I did not steal or lie or run off. My whole crime, as far as I could ever tell, was that I was quiet, and I liked books more than the television being on, and I did not photograph the way my mother wanted her children to photograph. My younger sister Monica had a laugh that carried across a room and a smile that showed up in every picture like it had been invited personally. My brother, when we were young, was the boy, and being the boy was its own kind of permanent excuse. And then there was me, standing a half step behind everyone in the family photos, the one my mother would rearrange out of the center because I was, in her words, making the shot feel heavy.

I learned early how to make myself smaller. At dinner I let the louder voices win. At holidays I stood near the edge of the picture without being told anymore, because I already knew that was where I belonged. Whenever something hurt, I swallowed it before anyone could accuse me of being dramatic, because in my mother’s house the worst thing a person could do was make a feeling into an event.

That habit followed me out of that house and into the rest of my life, and it took me most of my life to understand what it had cost me.