“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe some other time.”
“You could read the stories she writes,” my Mom calls out from the kitchen.
“Ehhh . . .” Uncle Carey says, waving his hand. “Why do that when I can get it from the horse’s mouth? Besides, you know they don’t print the real stories in the paper.”
“Lisette prints the real stories,” my mother says, bringing in a cup of Lipton’s for me.
“You know, you should cover some of the craziness going on in this country!” he says.
“Oh?”
“You should cover the riots. This country is exploding!” He seems excited by the prospect.
“I think we’ll be fine,” I say.
“You should—”
“Your uncle,” my mother says, “is supposed to be at the doctor’s.”
“Ah,” I say.
Uncle Carey waves his hand dismissively, as if this is all no big deal. “I already made my decision. I’m just gonna do symptom management.”
“Ah,” I say again. My mom had told me Uncle Carey was dragging his feet about chemo. There’s a part of me that’s glad. When I found out the diagnosis, I checked the five-year survival rates for his stage cancer and the percentages were in the teens. Besides, we both remember how it was for my dad. Sometimes fighting the good fight isn’t worth it.
“Did you know,” he says, “I’ve already passed the life expectancy for most folks in this part of the country?”
“Instead, he came here. For breakfast.”
“I’ve been thinking . . .” he says.
“That was never your strong suit,” says my mother.
“I’ve been thinking . . .” he says again.
“Here I thought I had a brother who was a fighter all these years.”
“What I’ve got,” Uncle Carey says, “it’s not survivable.”
Those weren’t words meant to be spoken, not in our family, not in that house.
“You know what I’ve got, right?” he says. “Can you say the word?”
My mother and I look at each other.
“Life,” he says, grinning at his joke. “It’s a terrible condition. It’s got a one-hundred-percent mortality rate.”
My mother rolls her eyes.
“You know,” Uncle Carey says, and turns to me, “my great-uncle, your great-great-uncle, he died when I was fourteen.”
“Yes, the game warden, I know,” I say. Great-uncle Alister, shot in some dispute in the woods, no details on who did it, though everybody knew it had to have been somebody from the community. Great-uncle Alister is part of our family lore, and he isn’t going to distract me. “With treatment, it’s the difference between months and years, right?”
He ignores me and starts telling stories about how he used to dream about Uncle Alister, how they’d go fishing or hunting and how in his dreams he’d ask him to tell him who did it, but he never got an answer. He tells me they weren’t sad dreams, they were happy, because Uncle Alister was a happy guy, even if he did get murdered, an event that I know from my mother absolutely destroyed the rest of my grandmother’s life, since she could never get over thinking about who did it. I get the point Uncle Carey’s trying to drive home, but to underline it, he tells me, “You know, there’s a lot of people I’m looking forward to seeing on the other side.”
I check my watch. It’s nine thirty-five. I don’t know why I bothered to check, or what possible difference it could make, now that I know the time.
“You understand, don’t you, sweet pea?”
He looks at me with his open, honest face. There’s something vulnerable there, and though I do understand, I’m not sure I should say so. We’re quiet for a bit and he keeps staring at me, like a child. When I can’t take it anymore I quietly say, “Okay, I guess I do,” and he smiles and sits back in his chair, and as he moves a flash of pain goes across his face for a moment before he settles whatever it was in his body.
“That makes me very happy.” He grins wide. “You and I always understood each other, didn’t we?”
“Sure,” I say. I avoid looking at my mother’s face.
“So where are you on to next?”
“I thought I’d go to New York, see some people, then . . . someplace new.”
“Someplace new. Always moving. You get that from me.”
“I get that from you?” Except for Vietnam, I doubt he’s ever left Cambria County.
He grins. “You know what I mean.”
I do know. I sip my tea without tasting it.
Uncle Carey leaves after breakfast and it’s pretty quiet between my mother and me until my mother, seeming to have come to some determination, says, “Your uncle never much listened to anybody, but . . .” and I know that what follows is going to be “he might listen to you.” Which isn’t true. He won’t, and I don’t want to get into it, or to pretend that I’ve got the ability to help live someone’s life for them, and live it in a way I might not even choose myself.
• • •
Over the next few days I try to distract my mother from the Uncle Carey situation. We take a trip to Pittsburgh. We visit Fallingwater and Kentucky Knob. And we visit my older sister Linda and her baby, which always makes my mom happy. Linda is settled. Happily married. She’s got one son and is pregnant with twins and she visits my mom all the time and helps out with Uncle Carey and is in general the kind of dutiful daughter nobody would have thought
