The first thing I noticed about Cousin Lucy’s husband, Sidney, as he greeted me outside the baggage claim, was the gun on his hip.
“Why the weaponry?” I asked as he loaded my suitcase into the back of his Explorer.
“It’s part of the culture around here, Stan. I’ve got one for you in the car.”
“Me? What are you talking about?” The only gun I’d ever owned was a water pistol, when I was six years old.
“You’ve got to display it,” he told me. “If you don’t wear it outside, where they can see it, people will assume you’re hiding it. Then they won’t trust you.”
We got into the car and he flipped open the glove box, revealing a gun in its holster. “This is a Glock 19,” he explained, handing it to me. “Just slip it onto your belt.”
“Is it loaded?” I asked, taking it gingerly.
“What good would it be if it wasn’t?”
“But I don’t know the first thing about…”
“Just put it on.”
I undid my belt buckle and complied. It felt strange—like a growth on my side.
“How’s Lucy doing?” I asked. “I know she and Uncle Phil were really close. I remember how he used to call her his favorite daughter.” This was one of Uncle Phil’s little jokes, since she was his only daughter.
“She’s doing okay, I guess, but he left a real mess behind. We think there’s a life insurance policy, but I’ll be damned if we can find it in that pigsty.”
“Well, anything I can do to help.”
“Sure, sure. We’re glad you came.” He sounded distracted.
A horn blared behind us. I looked over my shoulder and saw a BMW with two male occupants pull into the left lane and start to pass us. A bearded man in the passenger seat gave us the finger as they went by.
“Do you know those guys?” I asked.
“No, I was going a little too slow for them. That’s how people here generally respond.”
“Wow.”
He shrugged. “You get used to it.”
We pulled into a gas station. “I should’ve done this on the way to the airport,” he apologized, opening the car door, “but it’ll only be a minute.”
My intention was to stay put, but my bladder suddenly begged to differ. I realized I had no choice but to get out and, newly and uncomfortably armed, walk into the convenience store to use their restroom.
So I started to do just that. “Be right back,” I told Sidney optimistically.
A look of concern crossed his face, which did nothing for my confidence.
“Can you hold it, Stan? We’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Okay…” he said, looking off.
I went on into the store, where a young couple and their two kids were browsing the snack food shelves. The boy looked to be about seven, and his sister about five. Both parents had weapons, the woman with a shoulder harness that displayed six bullets and a knife, as well as the gun. The guy wore something similar to what I was packing.
The kids were unhappy about something, and the parents were, evidently, taking no shit.
“You feel like crying? I’ll give you something to cry about,” said the father to the boy, who glared up at him through tears.
“Shoot him, Daddy, shoot him!” said the little girl.
“Jennifer, shut that mouth of yours,” said the mother.
I made my way past them toward the unisex restroom, which turned out to be occupied.
After rattling the knob politely, I stood there, shifting my weight from leg to leg, hoping no one would notice me or care.
Across the store from me, a teenager with skinny, tattooed arms was manning the counter. He wore a T-shirt that said You Got a Problem? I couldn’t see a gun, but that was probably because I could only see him from the waist up.
The customer he was dealing with was an obese guy, sporting a weapon on each hip and a third holstered in what would euphemistically be the small of his back. He could have been the same guy that gave us the finger, except he was older and his beard was gray. He was none too pleased about having to come inside for a receipt.
“You ever gonna fix those fucking pumps?” he said to the kid. “This is a pain in the ass.”
“Hey, talk to my boss.”
“I’m talkin’ to you.”
“Robby, leave your sister alone!” said the father, grabbing the boy’s arm and yanking him away from the little girl, who stuck out her tongue.
“Be careful!” the mother said. “You’ll dislocate his shoulder!”
“Listen, I got no control over it,” the clerk said to his customer. “They keep forgetting to reorder the printout paper.”
“Either that or you’re too lazy to go out there and change it,” said the guy, leaning over the counter at the kid.
“Don’t talk to me about discipline, Maureen.” The father was still clutching his writhing son’s arm. “You’re the one that’s got them eating this crap.” He indicated the shelves of candy. “You just can’t help spoiling them, can you?”
“At least I’m not putting them in the hospital, which is where you’re headed.”
“Hey, asshole, back off!” said the teenager to the customer.
“What did you call me?”
“I called you an asshole. Are you deaf, besides?”
“You’d better let go of his arm, Frank,” said the mother, “right this minute.”
Something slammed into my back, sending me staggering forward. It was the bathroom door. In my distraction, I’d been standing too close to it.
I caught my balance just before I would have done a face-plant into a freezer case. From behind me a raspy voice growled, “What the hell’s the matter with you? Why were you blocking the door?”
I turned to see an elderly man with a cane and a shoulder holster, looking daggers at me.
“Sorry,” I said, “I didn’t realize.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” said the guy, scowling as he moved past me.
I gratefully entered the restroom. As I was closing the door I heard the obese customer call the clerk a punk-ass little shithead, while the young boy, still in his father’s grasp, began to wail.
“I’m counting to three, Frank!” his mother warned.
It was the longest and most stressful pee I ever took. At any second, I expected gunfire to erupt and a stray bullet or two to blast through the door into my body. At last, I finished. I washed my trembling hands and cautiously stepped outside.
Everyone was gone except for the clerk at the counter, who now had on earbuds and was listening to something. He watched me closely as I crossed the store toward the front entrance. I smiled at him and nodded, but he didn’t react.
Sidney was waiting for me in the car as I got back in. “Okay, you made it,” he said.
“Why did Uncle Phil pick a place like this to retire?” I asked him.
“Peace of mind.” Sidney chuckled as we pulled out of the gas station. “Maybe he did it because real estate prices were so low back then. Wait’ll you see his house, it’s a goddamn McMansion. But real estate values around here are low for a reason, and they ain’t coming back anytime soon. Especially not with an annual water crisis.”
“What about you and Lucy?”
“We rent. My company moved me here last year, but we might not be staying much longer. Rumor has it, they plan to relocate.”
A horn blared and another car, this time without the raised finger, zoomed by us.
“How’s your father?” Sidney wanted to know.
“Not so good. He barely recognizes me most of the time. When I told him Uncle Phil died, he thought I was talking about Max, his older brother, who’s been gone now, what, twenty years?”
“Something like that.”
“When I said it was Phil, he didn’t know who that was.”
“I assume your dad didn’t remember writing the letters we found.”
“You assume correctly.”
“That’s why I’m glad you’re here, for Lucy’s sake. Phil always refused to talk about why he and your father were estranged. Did your dad ever say anything about it to you?”
“My dad never said much of anything to me. Back then, I didn’t say much to him, either. I was hitchhiking through Europe, trying to find myself.”
“Well, maybe the letters will tell us something, if you can untangle his handwriting.”
The traffic had slowed because of road construction. A sign said the right lane was closed ahead.
“Shit,” Sidney muttered. “You are about to witness our local version of an alternate merge.”
And it was truly impressive. Every car in the left lane closed ranks bumper to bumper, the drivers stony-faced. In the right lane, our lane, people slowly tried to insinuate themselves, leaning on their horns in punctuation.
Car after car crept by us in the other lane. Occasionally, one of them left a minuscule space that was opportunistically filled by a front fender wedging its way in. The losing driver, forced to yield, would slam on his brakes and reward the victor with an ugly look.
We lucked out when it was our turn. A woman in a convertible, talking on her phone, was distracted enough to give Sidney a momentary opening. He moved into it and was called a “fucking jerk” for his efforts.
“Not too bad this time,” he said.
A few minutes later we arrived at Uncle Phil’s house. It was easy to spot because it was, by far, the largest in the cul-de-sac. All the others were three-bedroom affairs, with modest lawns and backyards. Uncle Phil’s house virtually took up his entire lot, practically touching the houses on either side.
We pulled into the driveway, and Sidney suggested we take my suitcase inside, even though we’d be staying at their house, not here.
“The neighbors are right on top of us,” he said, “and you don’t want to leave it where they can see it. They tried like hell to stop this colossus from being built, and they’re still pissed off. Even with the fences, I’d still worry about anything left exposed in the driveway.”
“Wouldn’t that include this car?”
“Unfortunately, yes.” He sprung the rear-door latch. “But we can’t use the garage because it’s filled with junk.”
I reached in and pulled out my suitcase. “Uncle Phil must have been some major-league pack rat.”
“You have no idea.”
Lucy was waiting for us in the cathedral-like entrance hall. “Oh, Stan,” she said as she gave me an enormous hug. “Thank you for coming!”
I hadn’t seen her in over fifteen years, since we both were in our twenties. I’d lost a lot of hair since then, and she’d gained a few pounds, but her face was just as I remembered, with the same look of fragile hope in her eyes.
“Please,” I said, “it’s just so good to see you again. This must have been a terrible shock.”
“He was in the bedroom; I was the one who found him,” said Sidney. “We hadn’t heard from him in a couple of days. We left a message on his phone and he never called back. So we went over there and, when he didn’t answer the doorbell, Lucy used her key.”
“I knew there was something wrong,” she said. “He’d been hardly eating, and he said he was having trouble sleeping.”
“Maybe that contributed to the heart attack,” I offered.
Lucy started to speak, but couldn’t. She looked helplessly at Sidney.
“It wasn’t a heart attack, Stan,” he said. “That was just what we told people. Your Uncle Phil hanged himself.
* * *
It was the letters, of course; that’s why they called me. If it weren’t for the letters, the two branches of our family would still be apart.
Uncle Phil had originally built the house after Aunt Rose died, under the assumption that his children and grandchildren would come and visit him, to enjoy the opulence and swim in the Olympic-size indoor pool that took up the entire rear of the house.
It hadn’t worked out that way. Lucy and Sidney never had any children, and her two brothers had moved with their families to Australia and Thailand, respectively, one for business, the other to do missionary work.
She’d contacted them in the aftermath of the grim discovery, and they were due to arrive in a couple of days. In the meantime, she and Sidney were dealing with the mountains of stuff in Uncle Phil’s vast, lonely castle. They’d found my father’s letters in a large manila envelope in the back of his bedroom closet.
Lucy was clutching that envelope now, as we reloaded my suitcase into the Explorer. A group of about twenty-five people, armed of course, were gathered outside the driveway gates, silently watching us.
“Just ignore them,” Lucy told me.
“What do they want?” I whispered.
One of them answered my question. “Tear down this fucking place!” he shouted. The others noisily agreed.
“They show up every time we come here,” said Sidney.
“Gee,” I murmured.
The crowd parted as we slowly and carefully pulled out of the driveway. A guy who looked like a Hell’s Angel banged his fist against the hood of the car, and a woman spat on it as we drove by them.
The condo development Lucy and Sidney lived in was about ten miles away. As we pulled up to the entrance, a stern-faced security guard asked Sidney to roll down his window, then made us show our photo IDs.
“Don’t they usually have some kind of sticker for your windshield that says you live here?” I asked, when we’d driven on.
“That’s just for the condo owners,” Lucy said. “We’re renters, so we have to go through this extra procedure. They’re not too crazy about renters.”
“No one seems to be too crazy about anyone.”
“You think?” said Sidney.
We arrived at the two-bedroom apartment that was their unit, and Lucy made us a simple dinner of meatballs and spaghetti. Then we took our coffee cups into the living room and the two of them sat on the couch, while I settled into Sidney’s recliner and began to read the letters.
There were five in all, written over the past year. In the first one, it seemed like my father was trying to make peace.
“Dear Phil,” it began. “How long has it been? Way too long, I’m sure. You’re probably aware of the particularly rough winter we’re having in these parts, so you must be grateful to be in warmer climes.”
He went on to talk about the nursing home and how the staff were generally attentive, but that he missed his independence. At the end, it was signed, “Love, Nicholas.” Then he added a P.S.: “Harvey Fields says hello.”
“Who’s Harvey Fields?” I said.
“He was one of Dad’s employees,” said Lucy. “I vaguely remember him.”
“Your dad’s company made microchips, right?”
“Silicon chips,” said Sidney.
“And what did Harvey Fields do?”
“I wish I could recall.” Lucy shook her head. “He was a young man who was only there for a short time. Did your dad run into him or something, after all these years?”
“I don’t see how he could have. This letter was written around the time his dementia was beginning take hold, so I’d say he imagined it.”
I picked up the second letter, written two months later. The handwriting wasn’t as firm, but the tone was the same—friendly and wistful, with more stuff about the winter weather. There were additional attempts at reconciliation. At one point, he used the term “water under the bridge.” Then, out of the blue, my father asked, “Isn’t it ironic that Harvey’s initials are H.F.? Do you ever think about that?”
I glanced up at Lucy and Sidney, who were watching me with eager expressions. “You got me,” I said, shrugging.
In the third letter, the handwriting was even more spidery, but still clear enough. He acknowledged that Uncle Phil hadn’t written back to him, but he’d keep trying and hope for the best. “I assume that, in your retirement, you’re getting a chance to kick back. I know how much you loved to kick back in the old days.”
“Wasn’t Uncle Phil a workaholic?” I said.
“The biggest,” said Sidney. “He never took a day off in his life.”
“Hmm.”
“Why would your father say that?” Lucy asked me.
“I have no idea.”
The fourth letter was barely legible. It had lots of misspellings and sentences that trailed off to nothing. A word that wasn’t really a word, “puzzlement,” kept recurring. One misspelled portion read: “I know abot your puzzlement. I always knew. I forget a lot thees days, but I stil rember that.”
“I can’t even begin,” I said.
“That’s okay, read the last one,” Lucy told me.
Sometimes, Alzheimer’s patients have moments of clarity. That’s what must have happened for the final letter, written just a month ago. The handwriting was still shaky, but the words were spelled correctly, even though it still didn’t seem to make sense.
“Dear Phil,” it said. “I don’t know how much time I have left, but I want you to know that Stan is taking good care of my affairs. I’m sure you remember Fallsview. Well, before they put me in here, I went back there. I left some souvenirs, souvenirs from Harvey. Stan will find them.” Again, it was signed, “Love, Nicholas.”
“Harvey again,” said Lucy. “What souvenirs? And what’s Fallsview?”
I shook my head. “Fallsview was a bungalow colony near Lake Placid, where we used to go in the summer when I was little. It must have held some special significance for him. I don’t even know if it still exists, but he certainly didn’t go there before we moved him into the nursing home. It’s hundreds of miles away. And what the souvenirs are, I haven’t a clue.”
“Oh well,” said Sidney, “it was worth a shot.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Please,” said Lucy, standing up from the couch. “Let me get your bed ready. You must have had a long day.”
“No longer than yours,” I said. “But can I ask you guys a favor?”
“Sure,” Sidney said.
“Could I keep the letters? I’m losing my dad bit by bit, and at least, these letters are a part of him I can hold onto.”
“Of course,” said Lucy. “Maybe they’re the souvenirs.”
“I guess they’ll have to be.”
Before I went to bed I gave Sidney back his Glock. Then the next morning after breakfast, they drove me to the airport and I made my escape.
* * *
An orderly escorted my father into the dayroom, where I was waiting. He sat him down in an easy chair opposite me, then withdrew.
My dad looked at me with the expression he usually wore—an open, friendly face that said, “Hello there, young man. I don’t know who you are, but I’ll be glad to listen to what you have to say, even though I won’t understand it.”
I leaned in close to him so I could speak softly. “He killed himself,” I said. “Uncle Phil committed suicide.”
It got no reaction, as I’d expected.
I confess that I hadn’t been entirely honest with Lucy and Sidney, but one thing was true, my father didn’t remember writing those letters.
That’s because he didn’t write them. I did.
Eighteen months ago, when his Alzheimer’s symptoms first began to increase, he sat me down and told me a story, one that he wanted me to hear before he forgot it forever.
Years before, Uncle Phil had asked him if he knew of a good bookkeeper. My dad recommended Harvey Fields, a young math student he taught at the college. Harvey was hired, and he’d been working for Uncle Phil for around six months when he discovered irregularities in the books, ones that seemed to show a history of kickbacks from suppliers and embezzlement of company funds.
It was true, as I told Sidney, that I was in Europe at the time, so I never knew what happened. My parents were about to leave for a three-week vacation in Hawaii, when my father got an anxious phone call from Harvey, telling him what he’d discovered.
My dad advised him to call the police, but Harvey said he was going to Uncle Phil’s house first, to give him a chance to explain. He said Uncle Phil had been very kind when he hired him, and he felt he owed him that.
The car to the airport was right outside, waiting, so my father didn’t have time to argue. But it bothered him for three weeks, and he called Harvey several times from Hawaii. He got no answer.
When they got home, he tried again and got a recording that said the number was no longer in service. He talked to one of Harvey’s neighbors, who told him that no one had seen Harvey for a while. So he went to Uncle Phil.
Phil said it was the first he’d ever heard of it. He denied that Harvey had been anywhere near his house that night. In fact, he said, Harvey hadn’t come to work at all since that day, and he threw in a disparaging remark or two about Harvey’s dependability. He complained about having to find a new bookkeeper.
My father told him what Harvey had said about the kickbacks and the embezzlement. Phil just scoffed and said Harvey was delusional. Now, he really was glad he had a new bookkeeper.
And that seemed to be that, except my father knew Harvey was telling the truth. He was convinced Phil had done something terrible to him. He just couldn’t imagine how.
One night, there was a rerun of Breaking Bad, the episode where they try to dispose of a body by dissolving it in hydrofluoric acid. It made him remember something. Phil once gave him a tour of the factory, and there were lots of containers of hydrofluoric acid. They used it to clean the silicon chips. If Uncle Phil wanted to kill Harvey, and dispose of his body in the middle of the night by immersing it in hydrofluoric acid, he sure had the opportunity.
The symbol for hydrofluoride, by the way, is HF, Harvey Fields’ initials. “Do you ever think about that?” I asked Uncle Phil in the second letter.
When I referred to how he loved to “kick back” in the old days, that was, of course, referring to kickbacks. And I was sure he’d see the word “puzzlement” as a senile malapropism for “embezzlement.”
For the last part, I had to hope my dad hadn’t actually said that Harvey called him on the phone. If Uncle Phil thought he’d come to our house, he might believe Harvey left some kind of incriminating evidence with my father. Those were the souvenirs I was going to find at the Fallsview National Bank, where Uncle Phil used to do business. I figured he’d assume it meant my father had opened a safe-deposit box there and left instructions for me.
My dad’s eyes were lively and alert now, disguising the confusion behind them.
“I didn’t want him to commit suicide,” I said. “I’ll always be sorry that happened. But I needed to let him know that someone was onto him—that he wasn’t getting away with it completely.”
The clouds must have parted for just a moment in my father’s head, because he leaned in close to me and whispered, “I hope he’s living in Hell.”
With tears in my eyes, I reached out and took his hands in mine.
“I think he’s been living there for quite a while,” I said.
Photography Credit: Jason Rice
Lenny Levine’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Amarillo Bay, Bamboo Ridge, Bitter Oleander, Blue Lake Review, Cairn, The Dirty Goat, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Eleven Eleven, Evening Street Review, Forge, The Griffin, Hobo Pancakes, The Jabberwock Review, Lowestoft Chronicle, The Opiate Magazine, Penmen Review, Rio Grande Review, riverSedge, Rougarou, Verdad, Westview, and Wild Violet. He received a 2011 Pushcart Prize nomination for short fiction.
