Things Unsaid: A Novel (12 page)

Max reached for
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble
. And he slyly picked up
In the Night Kitchen
, too.

Jules raised an eyebrow. “I said one book, Max, not two!”

“Please, pretty please,” he said. “That test made my head hurt.”

Sitting next to her on the low squishy beanbag chair, wiggling and turning the pages at the right time, Max seemed to know how to read.

“Max, you know this story so well. Can you pick out words now?”

Max loved Mickey, the boy who lost his clothes in the batter and
milk in the children’s book
In the Night Kitchen
. Come to think of it, all the little kids loved seeing Maurice Sendak’s drawing of Mickey’s little penis. Always made her wonder why some adults had banned the book, protesting that young minds shouldn’t see such explicitly drawn body parts.

“I just know how to follow along with my finger. My finger does the reading.” Max looked delighted with himself. “That’s why I fooled Miss McLaughlin. I just copy what everyone else is doing.”

Jules laughed. Max had been diagnosed a little later than others. He was a great pretender.
But aren’t we all at times?

“Max, see the little boy sleeping here? See the letter
Z
? What sound does it make?”

“I don’t know. I give up.”

“Zzzzzz.”

“You mean the letter moves?”

That was why she spent so much time with Max, more than with other kids. He was bright, original, and made her laugh. She needed more of that these days. It was good for her soul. She cared about these kids’ future. Kids like Max. Zoë, though, was no longer a kid but a beautiful teenager, and time had run out. She would be going to college in a few months and Jules would become irrelevant. She had to choose now. The moment of everything.

Consequences, unforeseen consequences. But she should have seen that there would only be so much time to be a mother. Now there were just too many ghosts and too many birthdays, celebrating nothing.

T
hey both took vacation time to be there. Uncle Wilson’s memorial service. Mike had enjoyed the company of her favorite uncle, too. But only one week after her mother’s birthday, Jules felt in no mood for more family affairs. Birthdays. Funerals. She was worried about their daughter. Zoë was still at her friend’s house and refusing to take her calls.

The PowerPoint slides of family reunions and ordinary holidays were on a timer. One by one, at ten-second intervals, each photo—about four feet square—flashed on the screen. Some of the slides were very old ones—more than fifty years at least, Jules reckoned, converted from even older emulsion photos. Photographs had been expensive way back then, and her father’s family had been so poor. There was one black-and-white of Uncle Wilson as a baby. There were lots of other photos, too: the wedding photo of Uncle Wilson and Auntie Alice, a black-and-white photo she would have had trouble identifying. The sporting goods store on opening day. Slides of good times with their large, boisterous family—two successful sons and six grandchildren. The other brothers included, her father excepted.

Then flashed the color ones. Some she remembered. The twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration of his store, for example. She heard the click-clicking of the space bar on the computer keyboard. More slides. The expected ones: the happy family gathered for first high school, then college graduations (for both sons—no playing favorites). The cap and gowns were the same throughout. Only the faces and the tassels were different. Then there was Charlie’s medical school graduation. Lots of
photos of that day. Repetitive, and a bit monotonous, perhaps, but a thoughtful and caring photographic tribute.

The Hyatt hotel in Los Angeles provided the easel for more old photos—hard copies, pinned haphazardly. There wasn’t a single one of her dad. Nor any from her family, except one of her, standing on her uncle’s commercial fishing boat, a bloody rag held over her left eyebrow.

Jules adored her uncle, and had hated returning to Ohio that summer after visiting him. She was almost sixteen years old. Grown up. California had seemed like another country to her back then. The water was still, the sun so hot on the Santa Monica pier that her flip-flops stuck to the planks, almost melting into the boardwalk. A Disneyland of rides—Ferris wheel, carousels, roller coasters, and the arcades, honky-tonk but thrilling. Andrew and Joanne, who was only eleven or twelve at the time, were going on Uncle Wilson’s fishing boat, too. Jules absolutely loved riding in her uncle’s old red pickup to the pier. Their dad had come along, but hadn’t really wanted to. She had felt he knew he wasn’t wanted. By anyone. Even then.

“Hey, little princess, ready to catch some albacore—the biggest and best there are?” Uncle Wilson gave Jules a long, delicious hug, his sun-leathered face all crinkly and grinning, part toothless and part gold toothed. She didn’t even mind him calling her “little.”

Jules always grinned like a freak around him. “Yeah!” she jumped up and down, feeling giddy. No one back home would know she had reverted back to being a little girl around him.

“Me, too,” Andrew broke in. “Boys always get more fish. Dad knows I can get the biggest one. You just watch me. He’s going to be so proud of my catch.”

But Uncle Wilson ignored him. And Jules loved him for that, too. Andrew dragged his pole to the other side of the boat, but no one looked up.

Her uncle whispered conspiratorially, his Coppertone lotion smelling sweet and rich to her, a fragrance she thought for years afterwards was aftershave: “I told Andrew the other side of the boat’s better. But the fish are biting here. He’ll be out of our way. Guess he doesn’t want to share the water … or the fish.” He laughed.

Jules had felt honored that Uncle Wilson preferred her fishing skills. By then, all her friends called her “Jules.” Not so girlie. But her uncle had called her that when she was in kindergarten, way before she had decided on what she wanted for her name. He had said she was like a chest of jewels, precious and beautiful. A family treasure. Jules loved the sound of it now. Her new name had sounded so grown-up and luxurious. Deirdre and her other friends thought so, too.

Joanne clutched Jules’s hand as much as she’d let her. She was still the baby in the family, although she was past baby age, and almost as tall as Jules was. But Joanne had sponged up their mother’s fear of boats and water.

As Jules was feeling the hot sun on her face, sticky with sweat and suntan lotion, her pole jerked in her hand. Squeezing her eyes tight and shaking off her sister’s hand, which rested on her arm, she clutched the pole with all her strength. Nervous, twitching with excitement, almost dropping the pole, she screamed, “Uncle Wilson, help! Help me! I don’t want to lose it.”

“Don’t you worry, pumpkin. We’ll get this one good.” He called out to her father, “Barbie, get the net … quick!”—all the while keeping a firm grip on the pole, his hand over Jules’s.

Silence.

“Maybe he’s taking a nap down below,” Jules said, wishing her father had stayed back at her uncle’s house with her mom and Aunt Alice. He just got in the way.

“You know, he’s never there when you need him. Said he wanted to go fishing. But then all he does is sleep. Well, we’ll have a good time anyway, Jules. Without him.”

Uncle Wilson called to Andrew as they struggled with the line.

“Andrew, get the net. It’s under the bench you’re sitting on. Hurry!”

With one expert yank, Uncle Wilson had reeled in a stunning metallic, shimmering fish—somersaulting and panicking on the line the whole way in—and heaved it on deck. Andrew slowly waddled over with the net, probably hoping to sabotage Jules’s catch. His face was subdued as he looked down at the squirming, lashing wild thing.

Jules yanked the net from her brother and scooped up her gyrating, flip-flopping trophy, but Andrew jerked back—so hard that the end
flew up, just missing her left eye and cutting deeply into her eyebrow. A shocked look on his face, he dropped the net and ran.

Jules cried out in pain, dropping the fishing pole and holding the left side of her face. Then Jules bent down to retrieve the net, blood dripping into her eye. Uncle Wilson gently took it from her hand and scooped up the fish. The albacore was bleeding from its mouth as he unhooked it, her blood dripping, the two trickles of red mingling on its silver scales.

“Let’s put it in the cooler on ice,” Uncle Wilson chuckled, depositing the thrashing fish into the Coleman ice chest. “We’ll have a feast tonight!”

Jules grinned, ignoring the blood—both hers and the tuna’s.

“Now, let me see that eyebrow, princess,” Uncle Wilson said as he matter-of-factly reached into his tackle box for bandage tape and gauze. “Looks deeper than it is,” he said. He washed it in saltwater, so gently that it felt good. “We could go down and get your dad to double-check you don’t need stitches.”

“Nope.” Jules smiled now, relieved. “I trust you. Let Daddy sleep. He likes to dream about marrying Donna Reed.”

Uncle Wilson looked puzzled, but said nothing.

She beamed as Joanne opened the red-and-white Coleman cooler again and again to peek at the albacore. Andrew came back to take another look as well; he sulked as Uncle Wilson stretched his tape measure across the fish’s glistening side. After that, Jules didn’t see either Andrew or their father for the rest of the day.
So much for boys getting all of the fish
, Jules gleefully kept repeating to herself … silently, she hoped. It was the best day ever.

Jules liked
that
memory. A real family outing.

The banquet room at Uncle Wilson’s memorial was full of tears. The first testimonial was from Charlie, Uncle Wilson’s older son. The UCLA neurologist. He had pages of notes. The microphone at the podium was set too low for him to speak into it audibly at first. After fidgeting with the mike, he began:

“My dad was the best dad ever.” Jules could hear that he was struggling to find his voice. “Never shirked his responsibilities to any of us: my mother”—Jules listened to her Aunt Alice’s muffled sobs—“my brothers and me, our friends. We may not have had much in the early days—when two boys and their parents live above a store in two tiny bedrooms, and one was actually a closet, that’s what they call ‘cozy’—but we never owed anyone anything.”

Jules caught Charlie’s smile as he looked down at her, picking at the cheesecake, and it made her wince.

“What we didn’t have in dollars we had in respect for each other. And love. We had each other’s backs, and we were and are stronger for it. My parents have made lots of sacrifices for all of us, too many to count. Our dreams became theirs. I can’t say I even knew what my father ever dreamt for himself. Everything was always for us. To you, Dad; I’ll miss you.”

Slump shouldered, Charlie walked back to sit down across from Mike, who patted him on the shoulder, man-style. “Hey, you did a good job,” was all he said as a gesture of comfort.

Jules wondered why she and Mike had been seated at the table for guests of honor, as if they were the close inner circle. Family.

At first she thought there had been some mistake. Why was she invited to the legal offices of Hawkins and Davis? Her cousins seemed to know.

The conference room was larger than the square footage of Jules and Mike’s entire home. Todd Hawkins’s office was upmarket. The highest downtown rent. A commercial building in Los Angeles with views of the mountains towards Pasadena … on a clear day, that is. Today there was too much haze. By Thanksgiving, the smog would probably be locked in for months.

Since Mike knew more about the law than she did, Jules figured he would translate any legalese at the meeting. She felt uncomfortable being there. Her uncle’s body was still warm, as far as she was concerned.

Uncle Wilson’s two sons and their wives were already seated on
one side of the long table, facing the expansive views from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Alice, bent over, dabbing her eyes with a balled-up handkerchief, looked tiny and diminished. Hawkins sat directly across from Alice—he discreetly slid a boudoir-size Kleenex box closer to her as she cried.