I put off going to my mother’s, knowing it would make the horror real. Her face would be etched with grief, and none of us would ever be the same.
Aunt Rita had parked her old Buick in the drive. I pulled in behind her but couldn’t make myself step out of the car.
My grandmother told me that Mom’s younger sister had been beautiful before she married Lesroy’s daddy, but to me she had always been washed out, like the faded pictures in our old family album. Her eyes were a pale grayish blue, her hair a dull brown. For special occasions, she dyed it a coppery shade of red that made my eyes hurt. She was thin—too thin, both my mother and grandmother agreed—and rarely spoke above a whisper unless she and Uncle Roy rolled into one of their screaming matches. Then she shrieked to high heaven.
When I was a kid, we saw Rita almost every day. Sometimes she and Lesroy stayed with us at Gran’s for weeks while Roy was on a bender. My mother would beg my aunt to leave him for good, but Rita always returned to my uncle.
I had a hazy memory of a violent phase before Stella was born. The only reason I remember it at all is because Roy kept showing up at the front door drunk as a skunk, cursing and crying.
Over six feet tall and beefy with a big barrel chest, my uncle favored wife-beater T-shirts that exposed thick patches of curly black hair. On his right forearm he had a tattoo of a grinning chimpanzee. After a few beers, he’d flex his bicep and make the monkey dance. That stupid dancing chimp never failed to get a laugh from my daddy, but Lesroy and I hated it. It looked ready to take a bite out of you if you got too close.
When Roy was in a good mood, he would catch one of us up in his arms, fling us high in the air, and whirl around and around until the blood pounded in our heads. Then he hurled us onto the nearest piece of furniture and laughed if we fell off. Luckily, he was seldom in a good mood, and my grandmother kept him out of the house when he was in a bad one.
I realized early Gran was the only person Roy feared. When I asked Mom about it, she laughed and said I’d have to take it up with my grandmother. Years later, I found out Gran had once broken a broom on Roy’s head. He’d come over to drag Rita home after an explosive episode that left my aunt with a black eye. Gran came up behind him and cracked him on the side of the head hard enough to addle him and break the broom. She continued to whack him across the face with the stick end until he ran bleeding from the house. My cousin insisted he’d been there when it happened, but my mother said he’d only been about six months old, and there was no way he could remember.
Although he was handy with his fists, physical violence wasn’t Uncle Roy’s strongest suit. He specialized in a kind of emotional cruelty we children could feel if not understand. One summer night we were sitting on the front porch with neighbors. Well into the second six-pack, one of them asked Roy where he’d gotten the name for his only son. Was it his full name? A family name? Lesroy stood by his daddy at the time, looking at his shoes.
“Hell, no!” Roy bellowed, grabbing his son and rubbing his knuckles over the boy’s newly shaved head. “The first time I saw this little squirt I knew he’d never measure up to the Dupree men. I mean, look at him.” He grabbed my cousin’s shoulder and squeezed. “No way he was gonna be a Roy, Jr., but he might be able to carry a lesser name.” Roy slapped his son on the back and cackled. “So, I named him Lesroy! Get it? Less Roy.”
I was only five at the time and didn’t get it. But Lesroy did. Maybe not the joke, but definitely the meanness. After that, it got real quiet for a minute. Then my grandmother spoke.
“Well, I think the world could do with a little less Roy, myself. Less of good old Roy and more ice cream. What do you kids think?”
The three of us put the mystery of adult cruelty behind us, went inside, and ate ice cream until our stomachs hurt.
. . . . .
Like my own daddy, who abandoned us shortly after Stella’s first birthday, Uncle Roy was no longer in the picture.
“Voila!” Lesroy would say and mimic waving a magic wand. “Gone, just like that.”
I asked him once if he was glad his daddy was gone. I knew I didn’t miss mine much.
“Not really,” he replied. “I mean, we can’t be sure he’s not coming back.”
But Uncle Roy didn’t come back. A year later they found his truck with him in it at the bottom of a small lake about ten miles from our home. I remember Aunt Rita had “a spell,” as Gran called it. Now I suppose it would be termed a nervous breakdown. It made me happy because Lesroy got to stay with us for almost two months while his mother was recovering.
My aunt was never quite the same after they released her. The biggest difference was the way she acted around Gran and Mom, like she was afraid of them. And she stopped visiting. Oh, she would come for holidays and birthdays, but she didn’t stay long.
The sound of a dog barking down the street brought me back to the present. I sighed, realizing I couldn’t stall forever, and
