But she is twenty-five. Or younger, because he didn’t correct me on the age.
The silence hangs in the air, and his expression grows pensive as he fits another nail.
“Their mother is in prison,” he states. “Ten to fifteen up in Quintana.”
Quintana.
Ten to fifteen…years?
I stare at my uncle who’s not making eye contact, a whole bundle of questions now ready to pour out. What did she do? Was he involved?
Do Noah and Kaleb still talk to her?
He moves down the line, and I follow him, noticing another board kicked off.
When was she sentenced? How long has he been raising the boys by himself?
I soften my eyes, watching him. That must’ve been hard. It’s a different pain, I’m sure. Having someone taken away from you versus someone wanting to leave you.
“You loved her?” I ask.
But then I drop my eyes, embarrassed. Of course, he loved her.
“I dove into her,” he explains instead. “Because I couldn’t stop loving someone else.”
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.”