The troubling thing, looking back: Getting blasted and sick as a dog didn’t scare me or turn me off one bit. Instead, I thought it was kind of cool. While I felt a nagging guilt from disappointing my father, who didn’t drink and who encouraged us to stay away from alcohol as well, I wanted to do it again.
A short time later, Beau and I went away to the Finger Lakes, as we did every summer to spend several weeks with our grandparents, the Hunters—Mommy’s parents, Louise and Robert. (Robert Hunter is my and Beau’s son’s namesake.) Their clapboard house with a wraparound porch sat on eighty wooded acres on the southern end of Lake Owasco, in the heart of God’s Country, in upstate New York.
Beau and I loved our grandparents so much. They never got over their daughter’s death, of course, but they embraced us, and we embraced them, in a way that helped us all continue to feel the massive amounts of love that Neilia left behind. Dad insisted that we know our mommy’s parents and her life. So we spent the month of August with Mom-Mom and Da-Da at Lake Owasco, as well as every spring break at their winter home in Florida, all the way through college.
Da-Da was a restaurateur who owned a downtown diner in Auburn, New York, a classic silver dining car on the Owasco River. (You can visit Hunter’s Dinerant today and see a picture of my grandparents on the wall behind the homemade pies.) As much as an eatery, it was a community gathering spot, and when my grandfather didn’t see someone come in for a while, he’d visit to make sure they were all right.
The depth of his concern and generosity wasn’t known to Beau and me until he died, in 1991. At his funeral, people came up to us, one after another, to say that if it hadn’t been for our grandfather they never could’ve paid for college, or bought their first home, or started their business.
Our days up there started with making the rounds with Da-Da, all three of us packed in the front seat of his yacht-like Cadillac Eldorado. One of us rode on our grandfather’s lap until we were eleven or twelve, when he’d let each of us drive by ourselves up the steep stone driveway, our heads barely peeking above the dashboard. We visited every relative within driving distance, starting with our great-grandfather and our great-aunt Winona, who didn’t really speak much—she had an intellectual disability—but had the sweetest smile that lit up the world whenever we arrived.
We also spent time every trip with Mommy’s two brothers: Uncle Mike, who would take us fishing, and Uncle Johnny, an electrical lineman for Niagara Mohawk who’d take us camping for a few days in his pop-up camper.
It wasn’t until we were in our teens that Beau and I learned they weren’t our Mommy’s biological brothers. They were siblings in every way except by birth—they were actually her second cousins. Da-Da’s brother, who died before I was born, was an alcoholic who had a daughter about ten years older than Mommy. She had alcohol and drug problems as well, and had two children out of wedlock. Da-Da and Mom-Mom adopted them both at birth. I don’t think anyone was keeping that story from us all those years; we just always knew them as brothers who grew up together with our mommy.
Those summers were free-range bliss: mornings with Aunt Winona; learning to play lacrosse with Uncle Johnny; going to Skaneateles to see Aunt Grace and Uncle Alan, who lived next door to the house where our mommy grew up; then swimming in the lake all afternoon, or playing thirty-six holes of golf and collecting balls, often when it seemed Beau and I were the only two people on the course. Our treat afterward was Texas Hots—wieners sliced down the middle with hot sauce—and soft-serve ice cream at the Skanellus Drive-In.
We’d take day trips with Da-Da, like to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, two hours east. One summer the three of us found a submerged wooden boat that had washed up in the shallows of the lake. We dragged it out and spent the summer repairing and caulking it. When we finished, Da-Da rigged it with a tiny motor and off we went. Beau, Da-Da, and I were so proud of ourselves for getting it back on the lake—until the boat started taking on water as we made the turn around a second cove. We tried frantically to get it back to shore. The boat sank right where we had found it.
Those summers became so deep-rooted in our lives that Beau and I went back there together for the last time in the winter of 2014. We stayed at the lake for two days, visiting everyone we could. Six months later, Beau was dead.
But that summer before my freshman year in high school was cut short for me a couple of weeks after we arrived. The kid I drank those beers with had gone on a joyride with a girl we both knew. He was drinking as they sped down a long road, lost control of his car, and crashed into a tree. He survived, but the girl was killed—the ultimate guilt-inducing tragedy.
I returned from the Finger Lakes early to be with him. His mother had asked me
