“When are you going to let all this shit go?” Jack spat.
“When you accept your part in it!”
I peeked around the door. My mother stood at one end of the kitchen, wearing her bathrobe and slippers. Her short golden hair lay messy around her face, and her features were pinched in disgust. She had folded her arms and was leaning to one side, her hip hitched up at a defiant angle. Small as she was, nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of Celine Gracewell. I, of all people, could certainly attest to that.
“I’m just trying to keep Sophie safe,” Jack said, his shoulders dropping in resignation. “Why won’t you let me?”
“Because I don’t trust you. Not after everything.”
With a frustrated sigh, my uncle stepped back and shook his head. “You’ve never trusted me.”
“Oh shut up, Jack.”
Feeling like I had heard enough to make me feel sufficiently uncomfortable for the rest of the year, I kicked the door wide open.
“What the hell is going on?”
Jack’s face flooded with relief, settling the high color in his cheeks. “There you are!”
“Yeah.” I pointed at myself for added effect. “Here I am. What’s all the yelling about?”
“Nothing, nothing.” He ran his hand along his graying buzz cut, stopping to scratch the back of his head. “I’m just stressed.”
Jack was always stressed about something.
“What are you doing here?”
“Being dramatic,” my mother hissed before he could reply.
Yikes.
“Is that your new car in the driveway?” I asked, coming to stand between my uncle and my mother and trying to alter the mood. “If you’re making that kind of money from the diner, you should probably give me a raise.”
He wasn’t amused by my joke. “I borrowed it from a friend. I’m not driving my car right now.”
“Feeling too conspicuous these days?” I tried to lighten the mood again.
There really was nothing more uncomfortable than awkwardness. And besides, Uncle Jack drove a red vintage convertible — an homage to his midlife crisis. It was only fair I got to make fun of him for it.
He sighed. “Something like that.”
My mother moved around me to fill a glass of water. “Just say what you want to say to her so we can get back to our lives.”
“What are you doing here so late?” I asked again. “And why haven’t you been at work? The deliveryman still hasn’t shown up.”
My uncle shuffled his feet like a lost child, unsure of where to put himself. “I know,” he said, his voice thick with weariness. “Luis died on Friday night.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling a sudden pang of guilt. The deliveryman had a name — Luis, yes, I remembered. And now Luis, who was barely forty, was dead. “What happened to him?”
“He drowned.”
“Drowned,” I echoed. “At night. Where?”
“In his bathtub,” said Jack, simply, like there wasn’t anything bizarre about that statement.
“Oh dear,” said my mother, covering her mouth.
I, on the other hand, was gaping. It just seemed so illogical. “Was it suicide?” The last time I signed for a delivery, Luis was chattering on about how great the weather was.
“Luis had too much to live for,” Jack replied matter-of-factly. “He didn’t do it to himself.” What did that mean? A sudden coldness rippled up my arms. My uncle continued, undeterred by the implication, leaving me to ponder it in silence. “Eric Cain and I are going to see Luis’s family tomorrow. I want to see that they’re taken care of while they deal with … all of this. His wife is inconsolable.”
I was starting to feel like a royal ass. I had met Luis maybe twenty times and I barely knew his name; my uncle knew his story, his family, and now he was going to go out of his way to make sure they were OK.
“That’s really good of you,” I said, looking to my mother for her agreement — surely she would give Uncle Jack credit for this — but she wasn’t paying attention to me.
“That poor woman,” she said quietly instead.
“It’s the right thing to do,” said Jack, to me.
“Are you OK?” My uncle wasn’t one for big displays of emotion, but I could see by his face that he was upset.
“Yeah,” he said, brushing off my concern. “I just wanted to come by and talk to you before I left.”
“You could have called me,” I ventured, not unkindly, but there’s just something so unnerving about people visiting you without calling first. “I’m permanently contactable.”