My mind’s not in the state I want, even though my legs are starting to really feel it, so I cut down Route 20, which was Uncle Carey’s favorite road for tricks. A UPS driver by profession, Uncle Carey believed you could, and should, take every curve in the road at twice the posted speed. He thought small hills were launching pads. He thought sober driving was for pussies and funeral processions. His favorite trick was called the bootlegger’s turn, where you burn down the road, throw the gearshift to neutral, flick the wheel a touch toward the shoulder with your right hand before yanking it toward the opposite lane while hitting the emergency brake and holding the brake release with your left. This sends the car spinning. Done right, you can pull a 360-degree turn and continue on your way as if nothing had happened. The first time he did it, I was ten, my older sister was thirteen, and he gave us absolutely no warning. I was staring out the window, in the backseat, my sister was irritatingly switching the radio stations every other second, and then my vision blurred, centripetal force smacked my face into the window, and then we were moving forward again. It was so surreal it didn’t even occur to me that I should have been terrified until about thirty seconds later, when he slowed down for a stop sign, turned, and gave us his big, goofy, gap-toothed grin.
The other trick he played with us was driving to the railroad crossing, stopping the car on top of the tracks as a train came toward us, and then pretending that the engine wouldn’t start. That, I did find terrifying, though in a strange way those times we spent in Uncle Carey’s car were useful training for being a war correspondent, insofar as it takes a lot to overload my systems.
I reach the stop sign where Uncle Carey had grinned at us after his bootlegger’s turn, the spot where my sister had bawled inconsolably while I stared at Uncle Carey, unsure of what I was feeling, excitement or terror or joy, until I chose joy and smiled back. I raise my arm and slap the metal as I pass, and then slow to cover a long, flat stretch at a medium pace, giving myself a little rest to prepare for the final uphill sprint to get home. I’m running on fumes—if it weren’t for being acclimatized to Kabul’s elevation this run probably would have knocked me out already—and the last bit’s going to be rough. Fourteen Burnham Street sits near the top of a steep hill looking out over Lower Yoder, and as I reach the crest of the hill there’s nothing in my mind except the pain in my chest, which has stopped being an ache and is now a sharp spasm with each intake of breath. And then I see Uncle Carey’s Buick in the driveway.
The Buick is a miracle—pretty much every part on it has been replaced, occasionally with parts that would rightfully belong to other cars, it’s been wrecked half a dozen times, more than one of those wrecks that should have meant it’d be fully junked, and patched up and repaired so that now it’s either a real monstrosity or a piebald beauty, depending on your perspective. Uncle Carey’s a “Glory be to dappled things” kind of guy. I have no idea why he’s here so early.
I walk through the front door to the spare, clean house my mother keeps. She doesn’t believe in the accumulation of “stuff.” My mother and Uncle Carey are sitting in the parlor, her with a pinched look on her face, Uncle Carey with a manic grin.
“Lisette!”
He hugs me, my sweat leaving an imprint of my body on his T-shirt. He seems thinner, but he’s got his hair, his face is even a little paunchier than last time, and a little redder. It’s not as bad as I’d thought, not yet—he looks more like slow dissolution through alcohol than rapid hollowing out through cancer, and I’d be relieved if not for the tension in the air. My mom tells me to sit in the parlor and when I start to tell her I’m going to shower first, she gives me a look that silences me. I find myself sitting in an armchair, leaning forward so that my post-run body touches as little of the chair’s fabric as possible, sitting across from my uncle, with my mother hovering in the background, scowling.
“How are you?” I say.
“Tell me a crazy story,” Uncle Carey says.
“You know she doesn’t like that,” my mother says.
“Sure she does,” Uncle Carey says, winking at me.
I shrug and start telling him about an arms dealer I’d met, and how he was the last of six brothers, all of them dead to violence, and how he looked as he told me about each of their deaths, and who killed them. I try to tell it almost flat, not so much emotion that my mother will think I’m really bothered by it, not so emotionless she’ll think I’ve gone numb. Midway through, the teakettle goes off, my mom walks into the kitchen, and even though she can still hear I relax and start to get into it, try to get him to really see him.
“No, no,” Uncle Carey says. “That’s a depressing story. I want a crazy story. Like the one about the guy who got shot in the face.”
This was his favorite, about a Marine I knew with a false front tooth that he’d received when he was room clearing and an insurgent shot
