Uncle Charlie was an asshole.
That's why I had not seen him since I was in 9
th
or 10
th
grade. So when he died about 20 years ago, I planned to ignore it the way he had ignored me pretty much ever since on birthdays, high school graduation, college graduation. I did receive birthday and Christmas cards from my cousins, who were little girls last time I saw them, and both older ones sent me their graduation photos with their announcements, soliciting gifts. And, it worked—I sent each something nice.
You would have, too—their senior photos were gorgeous.
Mom called a couple of days after the son-of-a-bitch died. "Are you going to the funeral?"
He lived and died over 400 miles away. "Why should I?"
"Everyone is going."
"Why? I thought no one liked Uncle Charlie."
"And now he's dead. Everyone wants to celebrate that."
Makes sense. But I was in the middle of a term of grad school two states away. Too busy and too far. And as a poor grad student, the gas cost alone killed my budget. "Sorry, you'll all need to dance on his grave without me."
That was that.
Or so I thought.
That night, right before I went to bed, I remembered my cousins' senior photos. I had them with me, down at the bottom of a dresser drawer where no girl would see them. Of course, not many girls had been in my room in a while because a master's program in history is pretty much a desert, totally devoid of women.
Something compelled me to look at their photos that night. The older graduated 2 years ago—or was it 3? I'll call her Kat, a pretty redhead with freckles, blue-gray eyes and glasses that somehow looked really good on her. Her hair was cut too short. Why would any redhead cut her hair? Underneath her photo was one of the younger sister, who I'll call Kitty. Blonde and very serious in her photo, she looked almost nerdy, but in the best possible way. The youngest had not yet graduated, and I could not remember how old she was, but she was a year or 2 younger than Kitty. Fae, as I'll call this one, sent a class photo that looked quite different. Uncle Charlie and Aunt Grace adopted her from Korea when she was a baby.
She was not a baby anymore.
Mom answered on the first ring. "I can't afford a hotel room."
"I'll find you a place in one of the local relatives houses. Does this mean you are coming?"
"When is the funeral?"
"Tuesday afternoon at 1. But get there early Monday; we are having a wake Monday night."
Wakes mean liquor. If I left early Monday morning, I'd make it in time to toast Uncle Charlie's journey to Hell in plenty of time.
#
Aunt Grace came out to meet me after some relative from her side of the family let me in. Uncle Charlie was my mother's brother, and he moved to Aunt Grace's hometown years before, so pretty much everyone there were from her side of the family. I barely recognized half. "Oh, so good of you to come," she hugged me.
"I'm sorry for your loss," I said. I hate funerals; I never know what to say.
"You can stop right there. I know you mean well, but no one here is grieving. He was a miserable bastard, and now he's dead. Your parents are here somewhere..." she looked and pointed toward the kitchen, "and your cousins will be glad to see someone close to their age."
Up 'til then, I hadn't really noticed, but this was an older crowd. My parents' age up. Way up, in many cases. I drove 450 miles to drink with a bunch of old strangers I was related to only by marriage to a guy even his wife called a bastard. My mother would pay for getting me into this! "Where are the girls?"
"Who knows? They slipped out. Must be terribly boring for someone your age."
Aunt Grace was really selling this. Learning the girls had already bolted I quickly calculated I could be back in my apartment by 6:00 a.m. Seven tops.
"Oh, you made it!" My parents came over, and I hugged my Mom. Charlie was her brother, douchebag or not, and now she was an only child. Despite his long list of flaws, she still loved him, and this must be hard. Everyone was drinking free liquor and laughing like this was a post-game tailgate after our team won. Which, technically, to their side of the family, it was.
They introduced me to aunts and uncles and cousins, some in their thirties, which at least was within ten years or so, most of whom regarded me as a nerdy egghead, because I was a nerdy egghead working on my master's degree. One relative even mocked my degree to my face. "Master's degree, huh? Like masterbator?" His relatives/buddies laughed at his great sense of humor. I intentionally forgot his name and drained a beer.
Some guys cornered me to mock my university's football record that fall. "Yeah, they suck. Luckily, I'm not much of a fan, since I did not go there for undergrad."
"Undergrad? Round here, we call that college."
No, around there, what they call college is the factory that employs half the town. And their rec team would likely beat my university's team that year by three touchdowns. Somehow, I choked that back. The guys started looking behind me and their mood picked up, so I prepared for someone to dump a beer over my head. Instead, the guy spoke past me.
"Hi, Darlin'. Where have y'all been?"
Hopes raised, I turned to see a somewhat familiar face beaming at me. My older cousin, Kat. "Well, they said you were here—how are you, cousin?"
Okay, some people photograph well, and when you see them in person, it is a total letdown. Kat is not one of those people. First of all, he had not cut her hair in the 2-3 years since that photo, which was a fantastic idea. Second, the class picture cut off at the top of her chest, leaving me in the dark that she had a pretty darn hot body. Not too small, not too big, maybe 5'6" and 125 or so pounds, all of it in exactly the right places.
Third, photos do not hug, but Kat did. And not one of those leaning hugs from a couple of feet away, but an honest-to-god, tits-pressed-against-you kind of hug. After the hug, she stepped back to look at me. "You're all grown up!"
"You, too," she said.
"Last time I saw you," I held out my hand flat near her boob, measuring height, "you were about this tall and chubby."
"And you had terrible acne. Thank god both of us have changed."
"Hey, Kat, want a beer?" One of the cousins by marriage offered.
"No, we're good. I haven't seen this guy in ten years, and we have some catching up to do," she hooked my elbow and turned me, then said to me, "and you need to see your other cousins. Besides, we need the good stuff tonight—and I know where it is hidden from these guys!"
Before she led me to the good stuff, she diverted to the kitchen where she poured some Jack Daniels Black into ginger ale. "I'd drink it straight, but Kitty already tried that and she is already messed up."
Uncle Charlie forbade drinking. Despised it. A fact which made his wake more of a poke in his cold, dead eye. Jack & Ginger was fine with me. Without a word, she led me into another part of the house, where people were sitting in front of one of those giant TVs from the 90s, an enormous box that took up half the room showing Melrose Place. Usually, Heather Locklear, Laura Leighton, Marcia Cross and Daphne Zuniga might distract me, but they were on TV and flat, and my cousin might not be quite as hot, but she was flesh and blood and 3D. And almost as hot.
She plopped down on the couch next to a hot Korean girl. "Do you remember this guy?"
The Korean hottie shook her head. "This is your cousin."
"Oh, wow!" She stood, and took the words out of my mouth. Oh wow, indeed. "I was probably only 5 or 6 then." More reserved or more sober than her sister, she held out her hand for me to shake.
"Where's your sister?"
"How should I know," she answered. For a few minutes, the three of us talked while most everyone was absorbed by Sydney plotting against her sexy blonde sister. Fae was still in high school, which was a shame, but Kat was away at the big state university an hour away studying computer engineering, of all things. I mean, she was a bit on the nerdy side, which made her even hotter. Even glasses looked hot on her.
"I bet you don't even remember me," a small voice next to me said. There stood a blonde waif easily recognizable from her photo, taken only months before. Same shoulder-length, dirty blonde hair, same eyes, only up close and in person emerald green with golden centers. Impossibly thin—too thin some would say—but in a way that suited her nicely.
"Kitty?"
"Where have you been?" Kat now stood with her sisters and me.
"Puking." Then she looked at me. "Sorry, not the best way to meet my long-lost cousin."
"He doesn't know how brutally honest you are, so go easy on him," Fae said.
Kat jumped in to rescue her. "He's cuter than I remember, isn't he?"
"He was cute then," Kitty said. "But I was in like 2d grade."
A guy in his early 20s walked up and put his arms around Kitty and Kat's shoulders. "Well, I have been searching for Charlie's Angels all over."
"Charlie's Angels?" I looked from one cousin to the next.
Kitty slithered free of the arm, stepping closer to me. "That's what everyone calls us. Charlie's Angels, from the old TV show."
"Yeah, I got that part," I answered, and it made sense, although, to be honest, these three looked more real, if only slightly less glamourous.
"Not anymore," Kat answered, allowing the guy to side-hug her still. "In case you haven't heard, Charlie is dead."
"That's what I heard," the guy said.
Kat looked at me. "This is our cousin, came all the way from grad school to say goodbye to our father."
The unnamed guy shook my hand, and I told him my real name while we shook, not the alias I'll use here. "Ben."
"We'll let you catch up. Come on, Ben, looks like you need a refill," Kitty said, and she and Fae led me out of the room. When out of hearing range, she said, "I can't deal with him tonight."
"Kat's boyfriend?"
"Ex. Every time she comes home, he tries to get into her pants. Now that our father's dead, he might have a chance. He watched us like a hawk. Any guy got near us and he'd swoop in and drive them off."
"That must have sucked," I said.
"Oh, you have no idea," she answered.
Fae added, "It was like prison. 10 o'clock curfew, call to check in every hour."
"Only if we finished our homework first," Kitty poured straight bourbon into my glass and another. "Don't mind it straight, do you?"
"Maybe you should cut it. After all, you already puked."
"I don't drink much—yet."
"What about me?" Fae looked on hopefully.
"You aren't old enough."
I asked her, "Are you?"
"I'll be twenty-one in three years. Want to see my ID?"
"Old enough to drink in your own house, I guess. Can't we give her a little?"
"No. She's not old enough." Neither would Kitty be for three years, but that didn't slow her down. The ginger ale in her drink wasn't enough to protect her from getting shit-faced. She couldn't weigh more than 90 pounds. Even at that weight, I enjoyed watching her turn around, because she had that tight little ass only skinny girls are blessed with, one that stops traffic and looks carved from stone. The kind I often dreamed about touching but remained out of touch of history students.
At some point, I lost track of her, but Fae and Kat kept me company and they weren't too worried about her, so I didn't, either. Then I went to the bathroom, and when I came out, I lost track of them, too. That's when my mother came up to me, panic all over her face.
"I need your help. Can you drive?"
