The Uncle They Were Ashamed Of
I could give you the whole list. I have carried it long enough to have it memorized. When I was ten years old, my mother would not let me invite a single friend to Monica’s birthday party, because, she said, this is your sister’s day, let’s not make it about you. I was not trying to make it about me. I was trying to have one person there who was glad I existed. There was no dinner when I graduated high school, though there had been one for Monica two years earlier with a cake and my mother crying happy tears at the head of the table. I got left out of the Christmas photograph the year I was twenty-two, because I had come straight from a shift and my sweater, my mother said, was not festive, so I ended up being the one who held the camera. I was not invited to Monica’s wedding. I found out it had happened when a cousin posted the pictures.
And then, when I was in my thirties, my parents sold the house in Millhaven and moved to a retirement community in Florida, and they did not tell me. My father was gone by then, and it was my mother’s decision, and she made it and executed it and got herself settled into a new state before I knew anything had changed. Two weeks after the fact I got a postcard. It had a pelican on the front. On the back, in my mother’s handwriting, it said, Settled in fine. Hope you are well.
Hope you are well. Like I was a dentist she had stopped seeing.
Even then, I kept trying. I want to be honest about that, because I think it is the part that shames me most and the part I understand best. I sent birthday presents. I made the polite phone calls that got answered on the fourth ring by a woman who sounded like she was doing me a favor by picking up. I left kind comments under the family photographs on the internet, the ones where I appeared as a blur in the background or did not appear at all, and I told myself that showing up in small ways was the same as being wanted. It is not. I know that now. But it took me a long time and it took me Warren.
Warren was my father’s older brother. He lived three hours north of Millhaven, on a small lake most people around here have never heard of, in an old cedar house his own father had built and he had spent forty years fixing. My family treated him like a punch line. Uncle Warren, who never married. Uncle Warren, who filled his house with books and record albums and strange little clay things he made himself. Uncle Warren, who my mother said smelled like lake water and pipe smoke and who she would not let sit near the good furniture the two or three times he came south for a holiday. When I was a girl I heard my parents call him an embarrassment more than once, quietly, in the kitchen, the way they said everything they did not want repeated.