UNCLE ROGER'S BIGGEST SECRET

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

The Hastings house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac lined with maple trees just starting to think about turning, the kind of upper middle class street where every lawn looked mowed by the same invisible hand. Zed pulled into the driveway behind a silver SUV I didn't recognize and cut the engine, and for a second we just sat there in the quiet, the tick of the cooling engine the only sound.

"You good?" he asked.

"I'm good."

"You don't look good. You look like you're about to take the SATs again."

"Thank you, that's exactly the confidence boost I needed."

He laughed and reached over to squeeze my knee before getting out, and I took one more breath, checked my reflection in the visor mirror out of habit, and followed him up the walk.

Nora Hastings opened the door before we even knocked, like she'd been watching from the window, which, knowing what I'd learn about her over the following months, she probably had been. She was a tall woman, sharp featured, dressed like she'd put more effort into a Sunday dinner than most people put into a job interview, and she pulled Zed into a hug first, then turned to me with a smile that felt genuinely warm even under its obvious appraisal.

"You must be Genie," she said, taking my hand in both of hers. "I've heard so much I feel like I already know you."

"Good things, I hope."

"Only good things. Come in, come in, you're letting all the cold air out."

The house smelled like garlic and tomato and something baking, warm and thick in a way that made my stomach growl embarrassingly the second we stepped inside. The front hall opened into a living room crowded with framed photos, decades of them, babies becoming toddlers becoming teenagers becoming the adults now scattered around the kitchen island with glasses of wine, and I felt the particular vertigo of walking into a family's whole history at once, all these faces I didn't know yet but was apparently supposed to learn.

"Sofia, come say hi," Nora called toward the stairs, and a girl who looked maybe sixteen, all elbows and attitude, appeared at the top of them, took one look at me, and said, "Oh, you're prettier than Zed described," before disappearing again, which made Zed groan and me laugh harder than I meant to.

"She's a delight," Zed muttered, steering me toward the kitchen. "Ignore probably eighty percent of what she says."

The kitchen was warm and loud, Nora directing the lasagna's final assembly like a general, an older woman I'd later learn was Zed's grandmother parked at the island with a glass of red wine and an opinion about everything, and a man I didn't recognize leaning against the counter with his arms crossed, half listening to a conversation, half looking at his phone.

He looked up when we walked in.

It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't a movie moment with music swelling, just a man glancing over at the sound of new people entering a kitchen, the most ordinary thing in the world. But something about the way his eyes moved over the room and landed on me and stayed there half a second longer than they needed to, something about the stillness of his face while he did it, unreadable, unhurried, made my stomach do something I immediately told myself was nothing.

"Uncle Roger," Zed said, "this is Genie."

Roger Crawford set his phone down on the counter and came around it to shake my hand, and up close he was taller than he'd looked in the photo Zed had sent me, broader through the shoulders, dressed simply, a gray henley and dark jeans, nothing that should have made an impression, and yet. His hand was warm and dry and his grip was brief and businesslike, exactly what you'd expect meeting your nephew's girlfriend for the first time, and he said, "Nice to finally meet you," in a low, even voice, and that was it. That was the whole moment. Nothing happened.

"You too," I said. "Zed talks about you a lot. The internship."

"He's a hard worker." Roger's mouth moved into something that wasn't quite a smile, more the shape a smile leaves behind. "Doesn't complain as much as I expected."

"I complain plenty," Zed said. "Just not to your face."

"Smart man."

There was an easy rhythm to it, uncle and nephew, the kind of banter that told me they liked each other, that Zed hadn't been performing enthusiasm about the internship, and I filed that away as a good sign, the kind of detail you notice about a family you're hoping to be folded into. Roger turned back to the counter and picked his phone back up, and that, I told myself, was that.

Dinner was loud in a way my own small family gatherings never were, Nora's mother, whom everyone called Gigi, holding court about a neighbor's renovation that she considered both tasteless and possibly a code violation, Sofia texting under the table until Nora confiscated her phone with the practiced motion of someone who'd done it a thousand times, Zed's hand finding my knee under the table in a smaller echo of what he'd done at the restaurant, grounding, familiar.

I sat between Zed and an empty chair that turned out to belong to Sofia, once her phone was returned to her, and across from me, at an angle, sat Roger, mostly quiet, occasionally pulled into conversation by Nora about something at the company, a contract, a name I didn't recognize, Renata something, that made his jaw tighten slightly when Nora brought it up.

"It's handled," he said, in a tone that suggested it was very much not fully handled yet but that he didn't want to discuss it at dinner.

"You work too much," Gigi announced, to the table generally. "That's why you don't have a wife anymore."

"Mom," Nora said, sharp, glancing at Roger.

"What? I'm allowed to say it. I'm old."

Roger didn't look angry, exactly, just tired in a specific, practiced way, the look of a man who'd absorbed this particular comment many times before and had run out of new reactions to it. "I appreciate the concern, Gigi."

"Someone has to have it. You certainly don't seem concerned."

"Mom," Nora said again, and this time it landed, Gigi subsiding into her wine with a small dismissive wave of her hand, and the conversation moved on, but I found myself watching Roger for a second longer than I should have, curious despite myself about the shape of the thing Gigi had poked at, a marriage that had apparently ended and left something behind that the whole family still tiptoed around at the dinner table.

"Sorry about her," Zed murmured to me under the noise of Nora asking Sofia about her homework. "Gigi doesn't have a filter."

"It's fine. I have a grandma who once asked a waiter if he was single for me, so."

He laughed, and the moment passed, and dinner went on, and it was, by any reasonable measure, a good night. Nora asked me thoughtful questions about my major and actually listened to the answers instead of just waiting for her turn to talk. Sofia decided I was cool enough to show me a video on her phone under the table, giggling, while her mother pretended not to notice. Gigi told a long story about a trip to Italy in the seventies that had almost nothing to do with anything and that everyone let her finish anyway, out of some collective, practiced family patience.

Roger mostly didn't talk to me directly again. He asked me one more question, near the end of the meal, about where I'd grown up, and I told him, and he nodded and said something brief about knowing the area, a job site nearby once, and that was the extent of it. Polite. Forgettable, if I'm being honest about how it should have felt.

It didn't feel forgettable. I don't know how else to say that without it sounding like more than it was, in the moment, because in the moment it wasn't anything, it was a man being polite to his nephew's girlfriend at a family dinner, and I was a woman who liked her boyfriend and had no reason at all to be cataloguing the sound of another man's voice. But I noticed things I had no business noticing. The way he ate like he was thinking about something else entirely. The way his eyes moved to the window sometimes, like he'd rather be outside. The specific, contained quality of his stillness, like a held breath.

I told myself it was just observation. I was a communications major. I noticed people. That was the whole point of me, professionally speaking, someday.

We left a little after nine, hugs all around, Nora holding my hand an extra second at the door and telling me to come back soon, Sofia yelling a goodbye from halfway up the stairs, Gigi informing me I had good bones, whatever that meant.

I'd left my jacket on the back of a dining chair, and by the time I doubled back for it, the kitchen had emptied out, everyone drifting toward the front hall, and Roger was the only one still there, rinsing a dish at the sink.

"Forgot this," I said, reaching past him for the jacket.

"Careful, the chair's uneven, it'll tip if you lean on it." He said it without turning around, like he'd clocked the exact chair, the exact wobble, without needing to look.

"Good to know."

He shut off the water and turned then, drying his hands on a dish towel, and for a second neither of us said anything, the noise of the family in the front hall suddenly very far away. His eyes moved over my face in a way that wasn't quite a stranger's polite once over anymore, something slower than that, something I felt land somewhere low in my stomach.

"You're good for him," he said finally. "Zed. I mean that as a compliment, in case it didn't land as one."

"It landed fine."

"Good." He held my gaze one beat longer than the sentence needed, then looked away first, back to the sink, dismissing himself from it. "Drive safe."

I found my voice somewhere and said something forgettable back, and walked out to the front hall on legs that felt very slightly not my own, and didn't examine why until I was already in the car.

Zed reached for my hand before he even pulled out of the driveway. "So? Verdict?"

"I like them. Your mom's great. Sofia's a menace, but a fun one."

"And Gigi?"

"I want to be her when I grow up."

He laughed, pulling out onto the street, streetlights sliding gold across the windshield. "What about Uncle Roger? He's quiet at first but he's a good guy. Best boss I could've asked for, honestly, even if he pretends he isn't going easy on me."

"He seems nice," I said, and it was true, and it was also, somehow, not quite the whole truth, though I couldn't have named what the rest of it was. "A little intense, maybe."

"That's just how he is. Give him time."

I looked out the window at the dark shapes of houses sliding by, warm windows lit here and there, ordinary lives going on behind them, and reached up to touch the collar of my jacket, still warm from the chair, still smelling faintly like someone else's kitchen. My phone buzzed once in my bag. I didn't check it until we were almost home.

It was a text from an unknown number. Three words, nothing else.

Drive safe. Roger.

I hadn't given him my number.