“Lucky for you, admission is free.”
“Then we’d better get to work,” he says, clapping his hands, and when he picks up the cardboard I feel immediately lighter, realizing how grateful I am for the help.
The house is all ours—Aunt Sofia is at work and Leo is in Michigan—but even so we decide the basement is the best place for this, so we send the cardboard thumping down the stairs, where it lands in a heap on the unfinished concrete floor.
“So,” Uncle Jake says as we cut the twine. “What have you got so far?”
I stare down at the oversized rectangles in dismay. “You’re looking at it.”
“Right,” he says. “So you haven’t…?”
I shake my head.
“And Teddy hasn’t…?”
“Nope,” I say. “Not even a little bit.”
He walks over to grab a notepad off the dusty desk in the corner. The basement is mostly just pipes, concrete, and extra storage space, and the walls are lined with boxes, many of them filled with things that used to belong to my parents, reminders of my previous life. Which is why I don’t come down here very often.
“Teddy’s got a tough road ahead of him,” Uncle Jake says as we settle down on the floor, which is hard and cool. “That kid just got catapulted up to the moon. And you can’t travel that far and that fast without some motion sickness, you know?”
I duck my head. “I guess.”
“But,” he says, his voice firmer now, “it’s no excuse for disappearing on you either.”
“He didn’t disappear, exactly. He’s in Mexico. For spring break.”
“Yeah, well, I imagine he could’ve worked on this with you before he left.”
“Teddy’s always taken more of a last-minute approach to things,” I tell him. “Though it’s gotten a little worse lately.”
Uncle Jake is watching me with something like sympathy, his blue eyes clear and direct, and I have to look away, because those were my dad’s eyes too, and my chest goes tight with the familiarity of his gaze. “Must be hard.”
“What?”
“All of it.”
I shake my head, not sure what to say. “It’s fine,” I tell him after a moment, picking up a pen and turning back to the pile of cardboard. “We’ll make it work.”
I know that’s not what he meant. He wasn’t talking about the boat at all. But I can’t think about Teddy anymore right now, and Uncle Jake seems to understand this too. So instead we get to work. He grabs his toolbox while I sketch rough diagrams, and we discuss the principles of flotation, things like density and balance and buoyancy.
And for a while I’m fine. For a while it’s easy to forget about Teddy and the fact that he’s spending spring break on a beach in Mexico while I’m spending it in our dimly lit basement, working on a project that we’re supposed to be doing together.
“You’re pretty good at this,” I say to Uncle Jake, who is making clean slices in the cardboard, following the outline I’ve drawn of the base of the boat.
He glances up at me with a smile. “I’ve built a few boxcars in my day.”
“What’s a boxcar?”
“It’s not all that different from a box boat. We used to race them.”
“Who?” I ask, still bent over my diagram, not completely paying attention, but when the silence lengthens I look up. My uncle is watching me with an unreadable expression, his mouth screwed up to one side.
“Your father,” he says, and though the words sound casual, I can see in the set of his jaw what this costs him. He never talks about my dad. At least not to me.
For a few seconds we stare at each other. Behind him a thousand specks of dust are floating in the light from the window, making everything dreamlike and indistinct, and I’m almost afraid to breathe, like it might shatter the moment, like it might signal the end of something that I wasn’t even sure—until now—I wanted to begin.
“He always used to beat me,” he says again, his voice gruffer this time. He bows his head and rubs at the back of his neck. “Drove me nuts to see my little brother whizzing past me year after year. But I swear that kid could’ve made a rocket ship out of two toothpicks and a paper clip.”
