The Uncle They Were Ashamed Of
I looked at Monica while it played. The blood went out of her face the way water goes out of a tub, from the top down.
Then, because Warren had told me to make sure it came from more than just me, I lowered the recorder and I said, “Doreen. You kept the visitor log. Would you tell everyone what was in it.”
Doreen stood up from her folding chair, this small tough woman who had bathed and fed and sat with my uncle for two years, and she said, plainly, to the whole crowd, “I was there three days a week for the last two years of Warren’s life. I logged every visitor by the phone, the way he asked me to. Gail came the second Saturday of every month, regular as the mail, and stayed the weekend. In two years, nobody else in this family came to that door. Not once. Not this woman.” She did not point at Monica. She did not have to. “The first time I ever laid eyes on any of them was at a funeral most of them didn’t bother to attend.”
And Hollis, Warren’s old neighbor, seventy-nine years old, stood up next to her without being asked and said, in a voice that carried without a microphone, “I’ve lived down that shore forty-one years. What she said is true. This one,” and he tipped his head at me, “used to walk over and check on him when the ice came in. I never once saw the rest of them.”
The lawn was silent. My mother had taken off her dark glasses. My brother, at the back, was looking at the ground.
And then the thing happened that I did not plan, the thing that finished it, and it came from the smallest person there.
Monica had brought her daughter, my niece, a girl of about eleven named Katie, in a good dress, to sit up front for the pictures. And in that silence, that ringing silence after two old people told the truth in front of forty witnesses, Katie tugged on her mother’s sleeve and said, in the loud, clear, terrible voice that children use when they do not yet know that some questions are supposed to stay unasked, “Mom, but we never went to Uncle Warren’s. You said it smelled funny and we didn’t have to go. Remember? You said we didn’t have to go.”
Nobody moved. Somewhere out on the lake a loon called, that long lonely sound Warren loved, and I swear it was the only sound for what felt like a full minute.