I narrow my eyes.
He stops and pulls out his wallet, opening it up and taking out a snapshot.
He hands it to me.
I look down at it, recognizing him instantly and smiling a little.
It’s actually not a snapshot. It’s a Polaroid with a sharp crease down the middle and faded faces staring back.
He lays there, on a picnic blanket, no shirt and long khaki shorts, hugging a dark-eyed girl to his body, her midnight hair splayed out behind her.
He’s pale and a lot scrawnier than what he is now, but he has that same smile that looks like he’s either laughing at you on the inside or thinking things that are only suitable to do behind closed doors. But with a preppy haircut and baby face that makes him look like he should be the douchebag quarterback on a CW show.
“You?” I look up at him, trying to hide my amusement.
He snatches the picture back, frowning at me. “I was quite the belle of the ball back in the day, you know?”
Was? Seems he still is.
He grabs a shovel and starts packing dirt back into the hole where the fence post stands.
“Your grandpa had a house in Napa Valley,” he says as I hold the post upright for him. “We’d go up there in the summer, play golf, get drunk, fuck around…”
We… My father, too?
I barely remember my grandfather, since he died when I was six, but I know he divorced his first wife—my dad’s mother—when my dad was about twelve, and chose another Dutch woman for his second wife. She already had a son of her own—Jake.
“I was eighteen, and I met Flora,” my uncle continues. “God, she was fucking beautiful. Her family worked on a vineyard. Immigrant. Poor…” He glances at me. “And, of course, our families couldn’t have that.”
I almost have the urge to laugh, not because it’s funny, but because I get it. For the first time, I realize Jake and I are part of the same family, and he knows them as well as I do.
“She didn’t have a swimsuit,” he mused. “All summer, I remember. It didn’t even occur to me she couldn’t afford one, because I loved that she swam in her underwear and undershirt when we went to the lake. Her body was so beautiful, the way the wet clothes stuck to her.”
I picture him, his hormones and emotions raging. What’s he like when he’s in love?
He sighs. “It was sexier than any bikini. I never wanted that summer to end. We couldn’t stay off each other. I was totally gone for her.”
But she’s not here now.
“One night your mother…”
“My mother?” I dart my eyes up to him.
But he’s avoiding my gaze, and his lips are tight.
“Your mother was a rising star, and your parents had just started dating,” he explains. “She took Flora out and got her drunk, and when Flora woke up, she was in bed with another man.” He finally looked over at me, pausing in his work. “Another man who wasn’t me.”
My mother took her out, got her drunk, and…
“My father,” I say, putting the pieces together.
Jake nods. “Your grandfather knew I wasn’t going to let her go, so your parents helped get rid of her.”
I blink long and hard. I can’t believe I defended them to my uncle. To him. No wonder he hates them.
“She felt so guilty, thinking she’d had sex with another man,” Jake continued, leading me into the stable to fill the horses’ food, “it was a piece of cake for the family to convince her our relationship was over unless she wanted me to find out what she’d done. ‘And hey, here’s fifty grand to cover moving expenses. Disappear, kid. Don’t call him.’”
“You never tried to find her?”
“I did,” he tells me. “I found her in some apartment in San Francisco.”
He falls silent for a moment as he pulls on his gloves. “She wouldn’t even let me through the door,” he says. “Couldn’t look me in the eye. Said she couldn’t see me anymore and didn’t want me to call.”
He cuts open the hay bales, and I take a rake and start to spread it around the stall.
“When did you find out what they really did to her?” I ask him.
He remains quiet for a moment, and when he finally speaks, his voice is almost a whisper. “About a week after I left her apartment and her sister called to tell me she’d died.”
Died?
I stop. “Suicide?”
He nods and continues working.
“Oh, my God.”
“And six hours after that, I packed a bag and never looked back,” he tells me, giving me a tight smile. “Got on the road, planned to head to Florida, but I got here and…never wanted to leave.” His eyes soften, and things I thought I knew start to melt away as the pieces of the puzzle come together.