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Uncle Dave lived on a houseboat with bleached aquamarine siding and a screen door that was unraveling at the edges where his Bernese Mountain dog pawed. In bad weather the houseboat bumped against the river banks because Uncle Dave’s bow- lines were always too loose. In good weather, the glare coming off the water could almost blind you, and Uncle Dave had to keep the curtains drawn just to see the TV screen. Alex Trebek’s sonorous voice and the scent of empty Miller Lights, permeated all twelve hundred square feet. Mom was forever releasing clouds of chemical smelling rose air freshener into the houseboat, trying to chase away “that bachelor smell.” Alex Trebek she just had to put up with.
Mom, a woman of the generation who believed bach- elors just couldn’t “do for themselves,” had long ago enlisted me to accompany her on her trips of house- keeping mercy to the houseboat. Uncle Dave would meet us on the dock as I trailed behind her, balanc- ing mops and brooms in our rolling mop bucket. His strong arms gripped mom’s arm and then mine as
he helped us onto the boat. He and mom sat in the kitchen, sipping diet soda, sharing the latest family news, mom doing most of the talking.
“Are you coming to the barbeque?” Mom asked during one of these trips, a mild Sunday in May.
Uncle Dave gripped his can of soda and shrugged.
“That lady from church is going to be there. You know, the one with the family place on the beach,” she added, as if my uncle had some great affinity for the beach.
Any smart person would have stopped there, but in those days, Mom was too persistent to waste time be- ing smart. “I told her all about you, she seemed really interested,” she teased, touching his shoulder.
Uncle Dave rolled his eyes. As far as I knew, no wom- an had been interested in Uncle Dave in a long time.
I suppose some would chalk it up to him not “putting himself out there,” but I think he just didn’t have it
in him to care about romance anymore. His wife and only son had died years before, when I was a toddler, in a camping accident. Something about an eroded cliff hidden by forest; the details were foggy. No one really talked about it anymore. I only knew because my cousin Calvin, one of those kids always trying
to shock you with stories of gruesomely deformed 35
babies and real-life cannibals, let a few choice details slip one afternoon at his house
“It was a shear drop-off,” he said as we ate Spaghet- tios while our mothers wrestled a new stand mixer from its box. “They hit the ground so hard they had to have a closed-casket funeral. Blood everywhere,” he finished, shaking his head.
I pretended that his words hadn’t made an impres- sion, but later that night I asked mom if what he’d said was true.
She’d sighed, receding into herself and her memories, becoming smaller as she sat at the kitchen table.
“All the rain that spring washed out the side of the mountain they were camping on. When your cousin Michael tripped over that tree root Colleen went
after him and...”
~
“But really, Dave,” Mom now said, tapping the alumi- num tabletop with her empty coke can, “at least come and see the family.” She tilted her head in the same coquettish manner she did when she wanted dad to take her out.
“Fine, fine,” he said, taking their empty cans to the trash.
Uncle Dave walked out the front door to smoke a cigarette. A few minutes later, stubbing out the butt on the screen door’s vinyl siding, Uncle Dave called me to him. “Say, why’s your mom so hell-bent all-of- a-sudden on setting me up with her lady-friends?”
It was a good question, though one I didn’t have a straight answer to. Over the last year I had observed a restlessness in her. She’d fritter around the house, agonizing for one minute over whether or not to keep this old magazine, before she was off to the bookcase, pulling books off the shelves in order to arrange them by genre instead of alphabetically. Insinuating herself as Uncle Dave’s de facto housekeeper had
Uncle Dave
JorDAn Dilley