By the time Matthew pulled his truck into his mother’s driveway, the sun had already begun its descent behind the horizon of tract housing, and he was late. He took a long drag off his Camel, pinching the filter between his thumb and forefinger like a movie star posing for an absent audience and blew the smoke out the open window. He was pacing himself. The car idled, and the heat from the engine met the already torrid August winds. Sweat ran down his sides in ticklish streams as he waited. Matthew glanced down at his watch and then adjusted the volume on the radio without observing either the time or the song that had been playing. Each movement was slow and measured, almost mechanical. He rested the cigarette in the corner of his mouth.
Taking off his Dallas Cowboys cap, brim stained with oil and dirt, Matthew ran a hand over his bristly, receding hair. In the rearview mirror, he saw the rounded chassis of a burgundy rental car parked along the curb. Reflexively, he rolled his pack of cigarettes into the sleeve of his t-shirt. He replaced his cap, turned off the truck, and stepped out onto the driveway. After one final drag, a quick flick of his fingers cast the cigarette, burned to the filter, spiraling into the street, and Mathew walked to the screen door.
All of this quiet deliberation was in stark contrast to the figure Matthew had cut on the construction site not fifteen minutes earlier. He had been furious with himself for working late when he was expected at his mother’s, but he felt compelled to keep the work on schedule. His frustration boiled over in the harsh words he had for his crew. When Matthew finally left, he tore off the lot, the truck tires spewing dust high into the air, and he sped down avenues and highways, the wheels squealing with each turn. And then, he arrived and waited.
Kneeling on the doormat, Matthew unlaced his caked work boots and left them on the front step. Absently, he brushed away sawdust clinging to the dense hair of his forearms. It was with a broad smile that he opened the flimsy screen door and stepped into the house where he had spent his childhood. As always, it smelled of Stetson cologne—the last remnant of his father’s presence—and decayed pine needles from an endless succession of Christmases, and the floor was carpeted in the same dour brown shag that Matthew had tracked mud across after football games in middle and high school. He heard voices coming from the kitchen, and he walked down the hallway toward them.
“Well, you know, she never did tell him that she didn’t want kids.” While Matthew knew that she never would have spoken so plainly if she had known he was in earshot, her remark stung all the same.
“I just don’t see—” His sister broke off as he walked into the kitchen. An embarrassed pause filled the room, and the two women in his life, standing next to the counter, looked at him sideways, over cups of coffee and crossed arms. The room felt cramped and confining, as though it were shrinking, and Matthew instinctively hunched his shoulders.
“Well, hello there,” he said, his voice booming. He kept the smile plastered to his face. As soon as his sister set down her coffee, he enveloped her in a tight embrace, reassuring himself of her presence. He leaned down to kiss her on the cheek and then pushed her out to arm’s length to look her over. Grace was beautiful in the manner of harried young mothers, her short blonde hair a tousled aurora about her face. Matthew realized that he had been staring at his sister, and he broke away to bestow a quick kiss on his mother’s head, just above her widow’s peak.
“Hi, Matt. Long time no see, brother of mine.” Grace’s smile soothed Matthew.
“Hi, Grace. Hi, Ma. Sorry I’m late,” he said, bending over the sink to wash his hands.
“That’s okay. I was just catching up with Ma,” said Grace.
“And there’s an awful lot to catch up on, what with your sister never calling me anymore.”
“Ma, I call you as much as I can. If you would just learn how to use a computer, you could pester me ’til the cows come home.”
Matthew interjected, “Well, Grace, you are halfway across the damned country. You can see how we all might worry about you.” He dried his hands on a dishtowel and then refolded it. “Pardon my language, Ma.”
“Don’t you get on my case too.” snapped Grace.
“Fine. Sorry. How was the flight?” He slouched against the countertop, arms crossed.
“Long. So long. I thought Connor was going to go stir crazy trying to sit still for so long. I gave him two coloring books and two activity books before we took off, and he finished them halfway through the flight.”
Matthew brought himself to his full height and asked, “So where is the little man?”
“He’s in my bedroom—or I guess it’s the guest bedroom now—either playing with some toys or reading. Whatever he’s doing, he’s being quiet, which is a pleasant and welcome change,” Grace said as she pushed her coffee cup toward the sink.
Their mother smiled. “He can be a little hellion, that one. He reminds me an awful lot of you when you were six, Matthew.” She rinsed out the coffee cups with scalding water, her hands seemingly impervious to the pain.
“Does he, now? Well, let’s see if I can’t go rile him up.” He left the room before they could object.
“Wait, Matt, he’s just going to start . . . Oh, goddamn it. Sorry, Ma.” His sister’s voice faded as he navigated the hive of small rooms to find his nephew.
Connor was lying on top of a pile of quilts in Grace’s tall canopy bed. The sheets, originally white with delicate flowers forming irregular constellations, were yellowing with age. The entire room still possessed an air of fey innocence, of wildflowers pressed between notebooks, of a past grown more golden with time.
Matthew had bought that bed with his first paycheck nearly twenty years ago. Although their mother’s administrative job had brought food to the table and paid the mortgage after their father left, there had been little room for extravagance. At seventeen, Matthew possessed a sense of gravitas that made him act as a surrogate father to his six-year-old sister, to both watch over and spoil her. Few things were considered more extravagant than a canopy bed—the kind advertised in the Sears Catalogue. Grace had never asked for the bed directly, but Matthew had seen the way she looked through that catalogue, the pages that she lingered over. Inevitably, after he had deposited his first paycheck, he found himself driving to Sears in his mother’s car to buy a pre-fabricated canopy bed for his sister. His mother had clucked at him, but he knew that she approved.
That bed reminded Matthew of each gift that had followed: her first bike, her ballerina classes, her piano lessons, her prom dress, her tuition for the paralegal program that had elevated her to the white-collar workforce. He had watched Grace move through each stage of her life, encouraging her as he could, and had led his own life as an afterthought. Even after she had moved beyond his reach, Matthew continued to hold something of his life in reserve.
Connor noticed him in the room. “Uncle Matt!” He jumped to his feet to lunge at his uncle, but he tripped on the sheets and sent himself airborne. For one brief moment, his face was a rictus of fear, but Matthew reached out a broad arm and caught his nephew up into a hug.
“You gotta be careful there, Connor.”
Connor laughed nervously, kissed his uncle on the cheek, and began to struggle like an angry cat, taut and muscular, to be released from the hug. Once set down, Connor sprang back onto the bed to play with some action figures, his voice intentionally loud to elicit his uncle’s attention.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, Matthew pointed at the jumble of toys and asked, “What have you got there?”
“These are Transformers. They’re robots that turn into cars and planes and tanks and stuff.” He gestured to a pile of mostly silver and black figures. “Those are the Decepticons.” Connor slowed as he said the word to make sure that he had pronounced it correctly. He pointed to a more colorful pile of figures. “And those are the Autobots. They fight the Decepticons. The Autobots are the good guys. Have you seen the movie yet?”
Matthew shook his head; he rarely had the opportunity to go to the movies these days. “You know, there used to be Transformers when I was younger too. They didn’t look this fancy, though.” He picked up one of the Decepticons and turned the toy over in his hands, examining it from every angle. It seemed sharp and hostile, the kind of dark creation that belonged on a heavy-metal t-shirt or a glow-in-the-dark velvet painting.
“Did you have any?”
“No, I was a little too old for them. They were really for kids your mother’s age.”
Connor nodded. He pointed at the toy in Matthew’s hands and said, “That one’s Megatron. He’s the boss of the bad guys.” Matthew stared at all of the toys strewn across the bed. It was apparent that Grace and his brother-in-law weren’t worried about spoiling Connor.
“You sure have a lot of them. Which one is your favorite?”
Connor immediately reached for a jet in the pile of Decepticons and held it up. “Starscream. He’s the boss before Megatron comes back.” He swooped the jet around and made sound effects through pursed lips.
Matthew put down the toy and asked, “Your favorite is a bad guy? Why him?” The question sounded oddly solemn, and Connor hesitated a moment before answering.
“Because he’s cool, I guess?” he answered tentatively.
Rearranging his bulk, Matthew stretched his arms and then rubbed his lower back, seeking out knots of soreness and fatigue. “So,” he said, “I know your body’s probably all messed up from the time change, but are you hungry yet?” He reached out and prodded his nephew’s stomach.
“Yeah, I’m starving.”
“Well, what do you want for dinner?”
“Normally, Mom makes—”
“No, no. I’m going to take you and your mom out to dinner. What do you want to eat? Out of anything.” Then, noticing a glint in the boy’s eyes, he clarified, “Aside from cookies, candy, or ice cream.”
“Oh. I dunno.”
“Don’t speak lazily. You either ‘do not know’ or ‘don’t know.’ Is that clear?” Connor’s father may have been the one with a college degree, but Matthew could educate his nephew just as well.
Connor’s face fell, and his eyes avoided Matthew’s. He nodded.
“Where have you always wanted to eat, but your mom wouldn’t let you?”
When the question was put to him like that, Connor’s response was immediate: “Kentucky Fried Chicken.”
“KFC? Really?”
“Yeah,” he said cautiously, as though worried he might be chastened again.
Matthew squinted into the distance and made a show of thinking very deeply. He stroked his chin, opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, and then closed his mouth again. Finally, he said, “That’ll work perfect. There’s a KFC right near my house.”
Connor whooped and rushed past his uncle and ran down the hallway to tell his mother. With his nephew gone, Matthew lay back on the bed and looked over at the nightstand where his sister’s things were arranged. Possessions of his sister now and not of his sister then. A contact case, a pair of reading glasses, a well-worn legal thriller from John Grisham: they seemed anonymous and commonplace and divorced from both his recollections of Grace and his fantastic constructions of her future life. Her present.
An irritated voice called down the hall, “Matt, if you’re going to get Connor excited, then you’d better hurry up and get your derriere out here.” Matthew could still hear her as she continued to their mother in a lowered voice, “Honestly, I hate how much he spoils him. It makes him impossible to deal with later. It’s always ‘Uncle Matt let me do this’ or ‘Uncle Matt gave me that.'”
Matthew heard his mother begin to respond to Grace, but he tuned out her speech and yelled, “I’m coming. I’ll be right there.” As he stood to leave, his reflection in the mirror of the vanity caught his attention. After examining himself briefly, his attention was drawn to the collage of photos of Grace and her friends from high school that was taped in the corner of the mirror, obscuring almost half of the surface. Girls in gowns or swimsuits or school colors were smiling and laughing with teeth flashing in captured instants or crying and hugging one another over some forgotten calamity. In the spaces between the photographs were phrases clipped from Cosmo and Vogue: “Friends are forever,” “Never doubt yourself,” “Believe in your true beauty,” and the like. In some ways, he remembered this fictionalized version of Grace’s past better than he recalled his own time in school.
He walked into the hall trying to feel some small measure of eagerness. In the small entry hallway, Grace was edging toward the door with Connor in a frenetic orbit around her knees. Matthew walked into the kitchen to give his mother a quick hug before leaving. She was microwaving a frozen dinner. He tried to ignore the fact that the kitchen table had four place settings out.
“Ma, do you want to come too?” he asked as he was halfway out the door.
“No, no. That sort of junk food just wouldn’t fit with my diet. You guys go on a head and enjoy yourselves.” The timer on the microwave ran down, and the chirp echoed in the room. Matthew nodded quickly and left his mother to her solitary dinner.
When he walked back to the entryway, he said, “Okay. Are you guys ready to go get dinner?”
“Yes,” Connor hissed. “I’m so hungry, Uncle.”
“Really, Matt? KFC?” Grace’s disdain was evident.
“Hey, don’t blame me. It was Connor’s idea.”
“Why do you have to indulge him?”
“That’s my job. I’m his uncle.”
Their mother called from the kitchen, “I thought that was my job.” Grace fluttered her hands in exasperation and opened the screen door. As she herded Connor into the evening, she called out over her shoulder, “Good night, Ma. We’ll be back later.”
Outside, Grace walked over to her car and then paused. “I don’t recall where there’s a KFC around here.”
Matthew leaned against the passenger side of his truck and said, “Why don’t you guys just go with me in my truck, and I’ll drive you back later. There’s no need to waste the gas.” He opened the door, and Connor climbed into the cab and buckled himself in without waiting for confirmation from Grace. Matthew grinned at her, and she swatted him on the shoulder as she followed Connor into the truck.
The truck started with a roar, and Matthew backed out of the driveway while Grace fussed over Connor’s seatbelt. The experience of riding in a truck, crunched behind the manual stick shift, was clearly an adventure to his nephew. Connor busied himself by playing with stray pieces of wire and shingling that Matthew had left around the cabin.
Connor pointed at the dented metal tool case next to Grace’s feet and asked, “What’s in there?”
Matthew checked his side views and said, “My tools are in there. That box has a lot of the stuff I need to use at work. Everything except for the power tools.”
“So, it’s like your briefcase?”
“Exactly.”
“My dad has a briefcase with really dark leather and gold locks. But I’m not allowed to touch it.”
“Well, I’m sure there are a lot of important papers in your dad’s briefcase. If your mother doesn’t mind, you can look through my toolbox later. I’ll just make sure that there isn’t anything sharp in there.” Grace arched an eyebrow but didn’t contradict her brother. Connor nodded and began to fiddle with the dials on the radio.
“So, how is Kent?” Matthew asked.
“He’s doing well. He’s in Boston working on a case for an important client. He expects to be back home in a few weeks, and I hope he’s right. In the meantime, though, it’s been pretty quiet. Sometimes he flies down on the weekends.” She spoke in short bursts, as though searching for each sentence amid a thousand possibilities.
“I take it that things at the office are going good?” Matthew asked out of a sense of obligation. Although he bore no grudge for the man who had taken his little sister away, he hardly felt any strong bond with him. Kent’s world, one of writs and memoranda and billable hours, was a world beyond Matthew’s knowledge, but he asked questions he knew were required. He read from a script.
“Yeah. He got a promotion a few months ago, which means more money and more prestige, but it also means he spends less and less time at home. When he isn’t out of town, he gets to the office by six and doesn’t leave until nine or ten.”
“Isn’t that hard?”
“It could be worse.” She paused too long before answering for Matthew’s comfort. He was going to probe further when he noticed where they were. Abruptly, he turned off the main street into the parking lot in front of a newly renovated KFC. The red and white paint was so fresh that it still looked wet. Perched atop the building, the ghostly face of Colonel Sanders stared benevolently out at the main boulevard.
Mashing his foot down on the parking brake, Mathew turned toward his sister and said with a subdued sigh, “I guess it could be.” Then, his voice more animated, he addressed his nephew, who was bouncing in his seat, “Who’s ready to get some greasy, deep fried chicken?”
“I am,” said Connor, waving his arms. Matthew turned off the engine, and they spilled out of the car. Grace looked through the restaurant windows and then turned back to her brother. “There aren’t any tables in there. Where are we going to eat, Matt?” she asked.
“My place isn’t much further. We’ll just go over there.”
“That’s fine with me. Why don’t you go help your uncle order, Connor? I’m going to give your dad a call to check in.” She took her cell out of her purse and dialed as Matthew and Connor walked toward the door. With the phone pressed against her ear, Grace waved at her brother as though she had forgotten something, and she walked over to press a twenty into his hands. He shook his head sharply and pushed the money back toward her and then led Connor into the air-conditioned restaurant.
While Connor wandered around the interior of the restaurant investigating every window frame and tile, apparently in thrall to his novel surroundings, Matthew ordered corn, mashed potatoes, and a bucket of chicken from the teenager behind the counter. She was no more than eighteen years old, and she was quick to smile. Noticing Connor’s approach, his curiosity apparently sated, Matthew lifted his nephew into his arms.
“You know, I just love kids,” the girl said. Her youth was appealing: fresh eyes, smooth skin, and the audacity to flirt with a man far too old for her. His flirtation, his exaggerated display of interest, was reflexive. They were old habits that reminded him of a time before relationships were just another method to stave off loneliness.
“Me too, Trisha,” he said, noticing her name tag. “But this one isn’t mine.”
“No?” Matthew couldn’t tell if she sounded disappointed or pleased.
“Nope. This is my nephew, Connor. Say hello, Connor.”
“Hello,” Connor said.
“Hello, Connor,” she said, smiling warmly at both the boy and his uncle.
There was an awkward silence, a silence that should have been filled with sly jokes and innuendo, but Matthew let it pass and set Connor back on the floor. After a few moments filled with the ominous sizzle of fat in the fryer, the girl smiled uncomfortably and disappeared into the back of the restaurant to check on their order. She returned with two bags and handed them to Matthew. He thanked her quickly and escorted Connor outside.
He handed the bags to Grace to protect while he drove up the side roads to his house. Her lips were curled in mock disgust, and Connor kept trying to peek into the bags and get a taste of the food.
The ride was brief, but the sun had set by the time he parked the truck in his gravel driveway. The halo of the headlights illuminated the patchy, unfinished paint job on the exterior of the house; the forest green paint Matthew had been applying looked sickly in the fluorescent light. He turned off the truck and hurried Grace and Connor inside.
The front door squealed as it opened, revealing a pitch-black corridor. Matthew looked over his shoulder at the shadowed faces near the doorway and said, “Hold on a second. I have to turn on the lights.” He counted four paces into the darkness, felt around on the ground for a power strip, and flicked the switch. The hallway, the exposed studs creating the barest suggestion of walls, shone with hollow light. Sawdust was strewn about the floor with piles forming in the corners, and pieces of wood, the sawn off detritus of repairs, were stacked precariously along the hall. The project had been undertaken as an expression of hope for a theoretical future, but it had devolved into this: the skeletal remains of a home that was never quite born, lit by a single construction lamp hanging from the rafters.
“I’m sorry about the mess. I’m fixing the place up, and I think I might have gotten a bit carried away.”
Grace smiled mutely, her lips pressed tightly together. She inspected the house without leaving her position, peering past the boundary between light and dark into the unfinished rooms beyond. “Is there a, um, cleaner room where we could eat?” She raised an eyebrow at something in the corner and then looked back toward her brother.
Following her eyes, Matthew noticed a small, silver and blue football near the doorway to the unfinished kitchen. It was one of the shrunken footballs made for children. Matthew had bought it soon after his marriage, ostensibly as a good luck charm for Cowboys games, but he had really meant to give it to his first son. Hastily, he kicked it off into the darkness to forestall any questions from Grace.
“Yeah. In the master bedroom. It isn’t really furnished, but I’ve finished the work in there.”
While his sister could hardly disguise her worry at the state of his home, Connor seemed fascinated with the labyrinthine twists and turns of light and shadow among the scattered sheets of drywall. With the construction lamp in one hand, Matthew walked down the hallway past a series of empty rooms that were now devoid of any purpose. Like a will o’ wisp, he led on. He moved the light erratically, so that it didn’t linger over the cold ceramic tiles and uneven swathes of grout or the carpet samples in myriad colors that lurked hopefully beside each doorway. When he walked into his bedroom, with the elegant hardwood mosaic floor and the pale blue paint, he let out a breath that he hadn’t realized he had been holding.
If not for the furnishings, the room could have been shown on Martha Stewart as an exemplar of the modern master bedroom: the moldings were simple and accentuated the clean lines of the room; there was a window seat that could open into a small cabinet; and a skylight soared overhead. To Matthew’s embarrassment, however, the furniture consisted only of a small cot with a sleeping bag, a blinking alarm clock, a fold-up poker table with four metal chairs, and paint-stained tarps pinned up over the windows.
Matthew hung the light from the doorsill and pulled the table closer to the 60-watt nimbus. Connor climbed onto one of the metal chairs and perched on his knees to reach the table while his mother inspected her chair before setting the bags on the table and sitting.
As he went through the bags and set out the food, Matthew said, “It isn’t as bad as it looks, you know.” Grace looked at her brother and then over at the food. Smirking, she looked at her brother expectantly.
Matthew snapped his fingers and said, “Plates, got it. I’ll be right back.” He jogged into the darkness with his heavy tread resounding against the wood. A minute later, he returned holding a bag of paper plates, plastic silverware, and napkins, which he set on the table.
“It looks like you’re living in a condemned building.”
“I’m fixing it up to sell it,” Matthew said. Connor slopped mashed potatoes onto his plate with a plastic spoon and stacked battered chicken alongside the gelatinous mess. He ignored the adults and ate as though he hadn’t been fed in days.
“What happened to your place with Cynthia?” she asked. Grace served herself delicately. Or she tried to. As she reached for a napkin, she knocked over a Styrofoam carton of gravy and spilled it across the table and into her lap. She leapt up and patted frantically at her jeans with fistfuls of napkins while Matthew and Connor laughed and she muttered the innocuous halves of expletives. Matthew smiled, his lips glazed with grease, but after the slapstick goodwill of the moment had faded, it was apparent that Grace still wanted an answer to her question.
He leaned back in his chair and sighed. “This was supposed to be the place. I mean, before the divorce, this was where we were going to live. It just didn’t work out that way.”
“Oh.”
Nibbling daintily, Grace appeared to be lost in thought. Matthew put down his piece of chicken and stared at his sister until she swallowed noisily and spoke.
“Ma told me why you two got divorced, but I don’t understand how you didn’t know that she didn’t want kids before you guys got married. I assumed you two would have discussed that.”
Matthew gazed at his sister levelly. “That’s not why we got divorced. Not exactly, anyway. It’s just easier to explain it to Ma like that.”
“Then what’s the real reason?”
“I really don’t want to talk about it, especially not with you. It doesn’t matter. It’s over now. When I’m done fixing this place up, I’ll move into an apartment and get on with it.”
She thought this over for a few moments. “But why not keep this house? I mean, you were right. When you finish it, this will be a great place to raise a family.” Idly, she pushed potatoes around her plate.
“Stop playing with your food, Grace,” he said out of habit. He didn’t see Connor’s reaction, but he heard him giggle. Matthew turned to his nephew and said, “And you had better clean your plate, mister. Join the clean plate club like your Uncle Matt.” He lifted his gravy and grease soaked plate to demonstrate.
“I’m serious, though. Why not keep this house?”
“I don’t know. Who knows whether I’ll even end up having a family. I’m no spring chicken anymore, you know.” He gestured toward the bucket of chicken with a half-hearted smile.
“Bullshit,” said Grace, drawing a wide-eyed stare from her son. “That’s a load of horse shit, and you know it. Just because things fell apart with that bitch,” she said, further astonishing Connor, “It doesn’t mean you won’t find someone else. You’re loyal and hardworking, and some lucky woman is going to see that you’re the type of guy who will stick around.
“Besides, you need someone else to spoil, or Connor is going to become the most insufferable little boy on the block.”
“Hey!” Connor sputtered through a mouthful of potatoes.
She smiled benignly at him and said, “Sorry, dearest, but it’s true.” Grace looked back at her brother, her eyes defiant.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s all you have to say?”
Matthew felt deflated, utterly defeated. He couldn’t find any other words to fit the moment, so he simply shrugged.
If Grace was disappointed with his tectonic shift in mood, she didn’t show it. She gathered all the plates and empty containers together and shoved them into a plastic bag. Then she grabbed the bucket of chicken, still heavy with wings and drumsticks, and the trash bag and walked into the dark hallway. Minutes passed with only a clatter of metal from the front of the house breaking the silence.
When she came back into the room, she flipped a small football, silver and blue, toward her brother, who caught it with one hand. She pushed the table aside and left Matthew and Connor sitting on their chairs in the middle of the floor like confused islands in a vast sea.
“Hey, Connor, why don’t you tell your uncle what you know about football?”
“But, Mom, I don’t know anything about football.” He looked crestfallen at having his ignorance so casually betrayed.
“That’s terrible. Doesn’t your dad watch football with you on the weekends?” Matthew asked as he stood and spiraled the ball from hand to hand.
Connor put both of his hands underneath the chair as though he was trying to limit his exposure to scorn and ridicule. “No,” said Connor. “He works in the garden or reads. Sometimes he spends the whole weekend in his office working on his computer.” He looked at his uncle hopefully. “I go outside and play, though. When it’s warm enough.”
Matthew smiled reassuringly and said, “Don’t worry about it, bucko. There isn’t a whole lot to know. How about I teach you how to throw a spiral? That’ll impress your friends.” His nephew looked confused but eager as he slipped off the chair. He started to push the chair aside, scraping the legs across the hardwood, but Matthew, suppressing a wince, picked up the chair to set it at the edge of the room. He avoided looking at the long gashes in the floor. Once the chairs and tables were out of the way, the room was almost cavernous.
Grace sat down on the cot and watched. Matthew flashed her an uneasy smile and then said to Connor, “Okay, go over to the other side of the room, and I’m going to throw you the ball.” Connor walked slowly to the wall, clearly still apprehensive about the lesson.
“Now watch, Connor.” He threw the ball gently, moving his forearm in a small arc and caressing one side of the ball near the laces. Connor watched half-mesmerized as the ball floated toward him with a pristine spiral. He was so rapt that he didn’t move his arms, and the ball bounced off his chest and spun to the floor. He scrambled after it and awkwardly picked up the ball. Matthew explained how to hold the ball and then told Connor to throw it back to him. When Connor threw the football, he heaved it with all of the strength in his body, and it spun end over end until Matthew snatched it out of the air.
With Grace looking on, Matthew knelt in front of Connor and explained each step of throwing the ball. His voice was low and soothing, and he was careful to never act exasperated when Connor seemed frustrated with himself. It was the same voice Matthew had used when he taught Grace how to drive a manual transmission. Even as her fumbling with the clutch resulted in a noxious smell of burnt metal, Matthew had kept his voice steady and reassuring.
Long after most six-year-olds would have become bored with any activity, Connor’s throws began to spin more tightly. When he threw his first spiral to Matthew, his eyes widened in amazement. A smile followed and then the slow bubbling laughter of accomplishment, and Matthew scooped up his nephew in his arms and tossed him in the air and congratulated him. Grace clapped and yelled her approval.
After that, the game devolved into a roiling wrestling match of keep away with the football. Matthew waddled across the floor on his knees to give Connor a fair chance, and the pounding of limbs against the wood reminded him of shadowy memories of similar horseplay with his own father before he had left. Connor sprang at Matthew and thrashed around yelling and growling in mock fury, trying to wrest the ball from his grasp. It was a game of the past, of youth, and of a time before questions and doubts had begun to coalesce. There were no rules, but if there had been, they would have gone unspoken.
Arms and legs flared into the air as the combined mass of man and child careened cross the floor, and yips and barks and exclamations echoed through the room. A warm thump brought the game to a standstill. Matthew quickly disentangled himself from Connor and crouched next to him. One of Connor’s small hands was pawing at his eye where—Matthew immediately realized—his uncle had accidentally elbowed him. His lower lip puffed out, and his eyes glistened with moisture.
Grace was by Connor’s side in seconds, but he continued to stare at his uncle. In those quickening moments before the tears could spill into reality, Connor’s body was rigid with accusation. Matthew could feel the buoyancy of the evening slipping away.
There was desperation in his voice as Matthew said to his nephew, “Hey, Connor?” He didn’t apologize or ask if Connor was okay because he thought that might trigger the tears. Grace opened her mouth to interject, but Connor nodded tentatively.
“You need to shake it off, buddy. Shake it off.” As he said this, he began to mime spasmodically. Then he took Connor’s hands and began to shake him too, dancing without a rhythm. Connor, baffled at first, soon began to flail around on his own with no urging from his uncle. His laugh pierced the air. Matthew forgot about his sister’s questions and the chaos that lay just beyond this room. Long after Connor’s laughter had subsided into a confused grin at Grace, and long after Matthew had taken them home, Matthew continued the dance in his mind: shivering and quaking and trying to unearth his own frozen memories.