The Uncle They Were Ashamed Of

On the afternoon of the memorial, close to forty people gathered on the lawn behind the cedar house, down toward the water, in the exact spot where Warren and I had sat a hundred evenings watching the light go. Someone had rented white folding chairs. Monica had ordered flowers, enormous arrangements that Warren would have found ridiculous. My mother had flown up from Florida and sat in the front row in dark glasses, dabbing at eyes that had not, to my knowledge, produced a single tear at the actual funeral, which she had not attended. My brother stood at the back looking like a man who wanted to be anywhere else.

And Monica stood up, in front of all those people, with a microphone Sharon had quietly helped set up, and began to give a speech about our beloved Uncle Warren.

She talked about the long walks. She talked about the wisdom. She talked about sitting on this very dock with him, watching this very water, listening to him talk about life. She got choked up at the right moments. She was, I will give her this, very good at it. The crowd made the soft sounds crowds make.

I sat in the second row and let her finish. That was the hardest part, letting her finish, but Warren had taught me that too, out on that dock. He used to say, Gail, you don’t have to answer a man in the middle of his sentence. Let him get all the way to the end of what he wants to say. It costs him more.

When Monica finished, wiping her eyes, and asked if anyone else wanted to share a memory, I stood up.

I did not take the microphone from her. I asked for it, politely, in front of everyone, and she could not say no without looking like exactly what she was, so she handed it over with a smile that did not reach anywhere near her eyes.

I said, “Thank you all for coming. Warren would have hated the flowers.” A few people who had actually known him laughed, the real kind of laugh. “He would have wanted me to keep this short. So I’m going to let him do most of it.”

And I held up the little digital recorder, and I pressed play, and Warren’s voice came out over that lawn, over that water, in the exact place he had recorded it, and the whole crowd went still.

I had cued it to the part that mattered. I want to be clear that I did not play the private parts, the things he said that were just for me. I played the part where he said, in his dry, amused, unmistakable voice, “Your sister is going to tell people she knew me. When she does, and she will, I want you to know that in forty years on this lake, Monica came to my door exactly zero times.”