Kelly seemed to enjoy it, watching my face go time machine as we walked the brick path toward the front door. A half-mile from the ocean, our street (“our” street—as if I still lived there!) stayed quiet most of the time, and though the houses lined up along the block on tight quarter-acre lots, the neighbors kept to themselves. It was early afternoon, the sun peeking through the haze. I reached under the mat, grabbed the key, and opened the front door.
“Uncle Dan will be hurt if we don’t stay at least one night, but tomorrow we can find a hotel.”
“You told him I was coming, right?”
“He knows I’m not alone.”
“Wow. Did you give him my name or am I just ‘plus one’?”
I carried our luggage through the door, bracing for a massive déjà vu. While the furniture appeared new, everything, as expected, was still in its place, the couch against the wall, the TV (now a forty-inch flat screen) on a stand in the corner, the bookcase with the photos of Uncle Dan and his old Army buddies wedged beside the window. After the war Uncle Dan had embraced a radical critique, his bookcase stacked with tomes by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, plus two copies of David Halberstam’s The Making of a Quagmire, both ragged from decades of re-reading, the pages covered with angry margin notes and blocks of yellow highlighter. On the top shelf, the place of honor, sat a paperback copy of Confessions of the Midnight Chair, my only published play. Next to it, in a silver-rimmed frame, was the clipping of The New York Times review by Frank Rich, the highlight of my dead career, along with various ribbons and certificates I’d won from the Young Playwright’s Foundation.
For a moment, I was a kid again, coming home from school to an empty house, silent and still, but as I looked toward the kitchen (hey—a new fridge!) expecting a snack to be waiting on the counter alongside a Do your Homework sticky note from Uncle Dan, I noticed something moving—someone moving, and realized we weren’t alone.
An obese woman in a bright floral housecoat gaped at us from the hallway, a chocolate chip cookie in one hand, and nothing in the other—because there was no other hand. She was missing her left arm, an empty sleeve hanging from her shoulder like a deflated balloon.
“Who—who are you?” she said, and bit into her cookie. Her grey hair was short like a man’s and her age was hard to tell, maybe around sixty. Cookie crumbs dropped to the floor as she stepped toward us, the hardwood planks creaking under her heavy foot.
“I live here,” I told her.
She shook her head, looking around as if trying to remember where she was.
“If you live here, how come I ain’t seen you before?”
“This is my Uncle’s house. I used to live here. He left me the key.” I held it up, dangling the rubber band Uncle Dan had tied around the tip. “We brought luggage. See?” Our suitcases stood by the door. “Who are you?”
The fat woman’s eyes drifted around the room, avoiding eye contact as she finished the cookie and brushed her hand, her only hand, against the side of her hip. The housecoat reached just above her knees, her mottled calves grey and veiny, ankles squat like pumpkins; she was barefoot, her toenails jagged and grey.
“Danny said someone was coming. I thought he meant that County woman.” She nodded toward Kelly. “You her replacement?”
“I’m a friend of Donnie’s,” Kelly said. She leaned forward to shake hands but then reconsidered, stepping back and settling for a friendly wave. “I’m Kelly Price. What’s your name?”
The woman watched us curiously. “Nancy.”
“Hi, Nancy,” Kelly said.
“How do you know my uncle?” I asked.
“I live here,” she said. “He didn’t mention two people coming.”
Nancy waddled toward the kitchen, her eyes keeping sight of us as she opened the fridge and grabbed a bottle of Mountain Dew, tucking it under her arm like a football so she could unscrew the cap with her one good hand.
Had an antelope or a kangaroo been living in my uncle’s house I would have been less surprised. Kelly nudged me and whispered, “Is that your Uncle’s girlfriend?”
Nancy put down the Mountain Dew, farted, and asked if we wanted anything to eat.
“Thank you, I’m good,” Kelly said.
“Suit yourself. Gotta watch the show now.”
She put the soda back in the fridge without capping it and headed down the hall.
“So that’s the famous Donnie all growed up,” she said—to herself, to whatever voices lurked in her giant head. She slipped into the bedroom—my bedroom—and slammed the door. The TV volume filled the house, a commercial for feminine hygiene products blaring through the hallway.
I walked into the kitchen and capped the Mountain Dew. “We’re not staying here.”
“Do you think—?”
“She’s not his girlfriend,” I said, sharper than I should have.
“Don’t be like that. Just because she’s heavy and missing an arm, it doesn’t mean she can’t be in a relationship.”
The thought that this Nancy person might be my uncle’s girlfriend made me want to slam my head against the wall. Uncle Dan had never had a girlfriend. As a teen, I’d speculated that he and Bonnie from the Jaybird were fooling around on the sly, but he never acknowledged it, and eventually Bonnie married some realtor. The closest Uncle Dan ever came to talking about relationships were the occasional cryptic references to someone he’d “cared for a lot” back in Vietnam. This, of course, was raw meat for a young storytelling beast like the teenage me. One of my first plays, written during freshman year, was about a GI from New Jersey who falls in love with a Vietnamese girl who may, or may not, be Vietcong. The play ended with the girl, Linh, killed by American bombs, the Uncle Dan character finding her charred body just as he was about to
