“Ironic that he should carry my name,” said Charles. “When you seem to be the one carrying my nature.”
This caught Nora off guard, and for a brief, wild moment she wondered if Charles had somehow read her thoughts. “Really?”
Charles nodded. “I see a lot of myself in you, Nora. You seem to see the world the way I do, which is quite something to find in someone I never thought I’d get the chance to meet. I’m very glad you’re here.”
Nora forced her eyes to the counter to hide the tears forming at their base. After her parents and Bubbie died and she and Charlie grew apart, she had never expected to feel anything close to “family” again. But as she and Charles stood there in the kitchen of her grandparents’ house, their synchronized washing and drying an effortless dance, a lost but familiar warmth fell over her that brought a smile to her lips.
“I am too,” she said, and then, almost in spite of herself: “How come Dad never told us about you guys?”
Charles stopped washing for a moment, adjusting his glasses with a sudsy, rubber-gloved hand. “That’s a tricky question to answer. Hard to say. Martin was different than the rest of us, in a way. He always wanted more, thoughwhyis still beyond me. I guess we weren’t enough for him, so maybe he figured we wouldn’t be enough for you kids either. Or maybe he just wanted a clean slate. We didn’t even know about him and your mom until after the wedding.”
“That doesn’t sound like Dad,” said Nora. “I can’t imagine him wanting to shut anyone out.”
“Well, people change. Not that any of that matters now. I’m sure he had his reasons, and none of us held it against him. We knew he was off to live a very different life and that he would find his way to what he wanted, whatever it took. And here you both are. I’d say he did a very good job of it.”
Nora allowed another small grin. “I just wish I’d known about you all.”
“Likewise, my dear.”
“You mean you didn’t know about Charlie and me?”
“Well, we only ever got the barest hints of information up here. Martin wrote us letters, mostly. We did receive word when the two of you were born. I still remember learning I had a nephew named after me. And we heard a bit here and there about your milestones. But I know he had to move you kids around a bit for work, and then after he…well, I had no way of knowing where you’d ended up. So many times on my supply runs, I’d thought how pleasant it would be to drop in for a visit, to watchthe only little ones in the family growing up, but you could have been anywhere in the world by then as far as I knew. To think you were only a ferry ride away all this time.”
Nora smeared the last water droplets out of a glass and placed it gently in the drying rack. Not for the first time since they’d arrived in Virgo Bay, she felt a flare of anger at her father. All this time she’d seen him as this infallible man who’d been stolen from her, but he stole from her too.
“That would have been nice,” was all she could think to say.
“Ah well, the past belongs in the past,” said Charles. “There’s no changing it now. The only thing we can do from here is decide what the future looks like. And I hope mine looks like a proper chance to get to know my niece and nephew.”
“I’d like that,” said Nora. She’d never had an uncle before. Her mom had been an only child, and for her whole life she thought her father was too. But her school friends had uncles and aunts, and though a few were not the best examples of the role, they had, for the most part, always seemed like a second, more lenient set of parents. In high school her friend Sarah Levinson’s aunt had bought them cocktails in a can to celebrate the end of the school year. Nora hadn’t drunk hers, of course, because even at that young age she knew that far too many bad things could happen when alcohol was involved. But the gesture had always stuck out to her as something that would technically qualify as “cool,” in a dictionary definition sense, and that was something few adults could be, according to her teenage sensibilities. Teachers and parents were old and boring, but aunts and uncles got to be cool, and Nora was being offered the chance to experience that dynamic for the first time. Granted, she could now legally purchase her own booze, and the uncle in question was wearinga stuffy argyle sweater-vest, but who was she to turn her nose up at the opportunity to have this new species of relative in her life?
They exchanged another identical smile, and for the first time Nora couldn’t help but see her father in Charles’s expression. Despite the lack of shared features, the warmth and the way one eye crinkled more than the other when he smiled were exact duplicates. Even if she was currently mad at her dead dad, Nora couldn’t help but breathe in the similarities.
As the day slipped away and night glided into its place, the varied age demographics came fully into play. Charles was the first to leave. Apparently, he had the farthest to walk, his house an exhausting fifteen-minute journey away, which he emphasized twice. Nora suffocated the urge to make a joke about the Jewish people wandering the desert for forty years without this much kvetching. These were her non-Jewish relatives, she reminded herself; they might not be as used to comedy.
Ruby and Richard were next to depart, preceded by a duet of yawning in C minor. Patty seemed bent on lingering awhile after her parents went off to bed, determined to continue braving her role as host against any tiredness that may have crept in. But eventually she too succumbed to the epidemic, her eyes already heavy with sleep as she shuffled out the door at Nora’s insistence. That left only the twins, who made their way down to the basement to get settled.
“Think I can finally let poor Jessica out now? Gran and Pops are on a whole other floor, so they definitely won’t hear her now,” Charlie said as soon as the door to their father’s old room was closed.
“I still don’t understand why you brought that thing,” Nora said instead of answering his question. Charlie was alreadyunzipping the duffel bag as she spoke, Jessica’s head appearing and disappearing like a Whac-A-Mole as the opening around her grew.
“You’ve been such a good girl,” Charlie cooed. “So quiet. Not a peep all through dinner. Such a good girl.”
“She has been weirdly quiet since we got here. You think she’s had enough oxygen in that bag?”
“Oh sure, I’ve kept all kinds of things in there before.”
“And they all lived?”
Charlie wasn’t listening. Jessica was on his forearm now, hopping up to his shoulder and back down, her head bopping. He bopped his head along with her. “How’s my pretty, pretty girl?”
Jessica said nothing.
“Huh. You think she’s giving me the silent treatment?” he asked Nora before turning his attention back to the parrot. “You can be just like my ex sometimes, you know.”
“Amanda or Roberto?”
“Dude, catch up. They were both years ago.”
