Say Uncle

Don't ask me that

Same time next week became a thing.

It wasn't something we discussed or agreed to out loud. Just something that happened, the way certain things happen between two people who are paying attention to each other , quietly, without making a scene of it. Thursday at seven. His car is outside my building. The restaurant in the back corner, or a different place, or once just a walk that turned into two hours and ended up on a bench by the water.

We never talked about what it was.

I think that was deliberate on both sides. Naming it would have made it real in a way that required a response, from us, from the family, from the part of my brain that knew how to be a reasonable person. So we left it unnamed and went to dinner on Thursdays and talked about everything except the one thing sitting in the middle of every conversation like a chair nobody would acknowledge.

Three Thursdays in.

We were at a wine bar this time, a small place with exposed brick and candles on the tables, the kind of place that made everything look more serious than it was supposed to be. He was telling me about a work situation , a colleague who'd taken credit for something that wasn't theirs , and I was listening and at some point I realized I'd been watching his hands while he talked. The way he moved them when he explained something. He had good hands. He always had good hands and I had never let myself look at them for this long before.

I looked up and he'd stopped talking.

He was watching me watch him.

"Sorry," I said.

"Don't be."

I picked up my wine glass. My face was warm.

We were quiet for a moment. The bar hummed around us , other conversations, low music, the clink of glasses. In the middle of all that noise we were in our own small silence.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"You can ask me anything."

"Why did you send me the photo. The first one. Edinburgh."

He turned his wine glass slowly on the table, he didn't answer immediately. The thing about Caden was that he didn't rush answers. He thought about what he was going to say before he said it, which was something I'd always found steadying and was currently finding excruciating.

"You mentioned it once," he said.

"I know I mentioned it. You remembered it fourteen months later and flew through Edinburgh on your way home from London and the first thing you did was take a photo and send it to me." I kept my voice even. "That's not just remembering something someone said."

He looked at me.

"No," he agreed. "It's not."

"So why?"

He leaned back in his chair slightly and studied me in that quiet, deliberate way of his, like he was deciding something. "Because I wanted you to see it," he said. "Because every time I see something worth seeing, you're the first person I think of."

The bar kept humming. Somewhere behind me a woman laughed at something. The candle between us flickered.

I didn't know what to do with that sentence. I just sat with it.

"Caden."

"I know."

"You know what I'm going to say."

"Probably."

"This is, " I stopped. Tried again. "We're, "

"I know what we are," he said. In a steady and not defensive. Just a fact. "I know exactly what we are and I know exactly what this looks like and I've been aware of all of it for longer than you know. I haven't been sitting here unaware, Mara."

"Then what are we doing?"

He looked at me for a long moment. The candle threw light across his face. He looked tired in the way that had nothing to do with sleep, the kind of tired that comes from carrying something for a long time.

"I don't know," he said. "But I'm not ready to stop."

I should have said something sensible, something that will acknowledge the reality of what we were, his brother's daughter, his family, his niece, who had no business sitting in a wine bar with him on a Thursday night talking about why he'd sent her a photo of a city he remembered her mentioning.

Instead, I said: "Neither am I."

He looked at me. He was not surprised and not relieved exactly. More like a man who had been braced for a door to close and was adjusting to the fact that it hadn't.

We stayed another hour and talked about easier things. He walked me home the long way, which added ten minutes, and neither of us mentioned it.

At my door I turned around.

He was close. He was always a little closer than he needed to be these days and I had stopped pretending not to notice.

"I want to ask you something," he said.

"Okay."

"And I want you to answer honestly."

"I always answer you honestly."

He looked at me and asked, "Do you want me to stop this? Any part of it, the dinners, the texts, any of it. If you want me to stop, say it now and I will. I mean that."

I looked at him standing there in the dark outside my door, this man who had been careful and controlled and honest and present in a way that made everything else feel quieter. I looked at him and thought about the right answer and the true answer and whether they were the same thing.

They weren't the same thing.

"Don't stop," I said. He looked at me for a long moment. Then he lifted my hand, pressed his lips to my knuckles , slow, deliberate, and walked away without another word. I stood at my door and felt it like a mark.