“Nothing we had in common was real or genuine, ” he says to me as I do the dumb thing and stare at my hands. “You realize we fucking hate each other?”

It had been a long weekend with my uncle. The crazy.

No one really knew what he did.

He drank.

He smoked cigarettes, but I swear they were a different brand last time we visited.

He had this orange shirt that had faded into this strange terra-cotta/salmon color thanks to his organic sodium mixed with infinite hot washes.

He had a name, but no one really seemed to use it in conversation. You just knew who they were talking about when you walked up to the table. Or the conversation would be started by some object being glared at by more than 2 people in the room. One person would raise their eyebrows and the other would nod.

He was what you talked to the cousins about after you ran out of the obvious questions and everything else seemed like it would awkwardly point out how far you had drifted apart.

But now?

He hated me.

He was supposed to be watching me while my parents did what ever it is parents do when revisiting their hometown after 15+ years living elsewhere. So I was sat down in front of the tv on some corduroy masterpiece of a couch he had managed to keep clean. To be fair, his place was pretty clean.

He was clean in scrubbed-raw way. The sun-bleached way. Everything smelled of boiling water.

He watched tv with me for one 30 minute segment, and then we started some movie. It was a film I, apparently, was a minority for not seeing, and now I must remedy this fault within myself. So we chilled. I’m pretty sure he was drinking. I’m also pretty sure that he had jokingly offered me, a minor, a drink earlier. I’m really sure it wasn’t that much of a joke.

He left partway through the film and went to this sort of half basement/spare room that was allowed for by the house being built into a hill. Sometimes I could hear some shuffling, placing of things, typing, but never much else. I was still pretty uncomfortable around him and wasn’t quite sure where the restroom was. After the movie was over, another one began playing. This one I had seen before. I needed to pee. It was getting dark.

He had started murmuring to himself. At first I thought it was the film, but then I noticed there was laughter during inappropriate parts. I turned the volume down. Not all at once. I took maybe a good 10 minutes to get down 5 even numbers. They always have to be even.

He wasn’t so much murmuring now. His voice had risen to normal conversation mode. I heard a beer open. I heard him talk and put the can down on the table several times over the rest of the second movie. As if on cue he started to come out of the room right as it ended.

“He looks happy” is all I can think. I realize I am turned, open mouthed smiling at him with the volume very low.

He realizes too and becomes a shade of scarlet I have only seen once before.

He takes me outside and sits me on the tail gate of his truck and starts pacing in front of me. I’m not quite sure what is happening at this point, but I fantasize about romans dragging prisoners behind chariots. “Am I in trouble?”

He is throwing his hands up and pacing this awkward oval in the driveway.

He has mastered this drunken mumble yelling. I have no idea what he is communicating. I ask “is that room why you are upset?”

He says he needs advice

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