Uncle Antonio had lain in the living rooms of three generations of Cardinis when my father inherited him from his Great Aunt Clara. I could never remember precisely whose uncle he was, but I guessed it didn't matter.
It was my job to dust Uncle Antonio on Saturday mornings. Out of the corner of my eye I would watch Superman or Bugs Bunny while I tickled his bushy black whiskers with the feather duster. His uncomfortable looking, old-fashioned suit would need straightening. In the summer, the squeaky chrome fan would blow his hair into disarray, and so on Saturdays I would carefully rearrange the curls atop his red satin pillow. Sometimes, when I was very young, I would place a Barbie or a stuffed animal in the crook of his elbow.
One evening just after I turned twelve, my mother announced at dinner that she planned to redecorate. My brother Ralph continued to shovel meatloaf into his face. He was sixteen and he was hungry all the time, even on meatloaf night.
Dad froze, though, a spoonful of peas halfway to his open mouth. He could sense something coming, the way animals can sense an approaching storm. "Redecorate?" he choked.
"Yes," Mom replied brightly. Her head was tilted slightly to the right, and her eyebrows were raised. I recognized this expression. It meant she had set her mind, and all the whining and arguing in the world would only get you sent to your room.
But Dad was brave. "What did you have in mind?" he ventured, putting down his spoon.
Mom smiled dangerously. "Not too much. Just a little updating. A new carpet, repaint those depressing walls, maybe a slipcover for the couch."
Dad looked wary. He suspected this was only those fat raindrops that precede the deluge. "That sounds reasonable." He risked a small smile. "I'm pretty tired of those orange flowers myself."
Mom smiled back and looked down at her plate. For a few minutes, only the sounds of chewing and cutlery echoed faintly around the kitchen. I sipped my Hawaiian Punch.
Then lightning struck.
"Uncle Antonio has got to go," Mom almost whispered.
Dad gaped. Ralph stopped inhaling his mashed potatoes. I knocked over my glass, spilling red liquid onto my lap, but nobody even noticed.
Mom's eyes flashed at Dad like blue fire. "There's no way that room will look modern with him there. Besides, with him gone I bet we would have room for a bigger stereo system."
If Mom had intended this last sentence to be conciliatory, she must've been disappointed. Dad leapt up so violently that he knocked his chair over backwards. His face was an alarming red. I was glad we hadn't used steak knives that night.
"Uncle Antonio," Dad thundered, "will stay right. Where. He. IS!!" He kicked the chair out of his way as he marched to the back door. He tore his keyring off of the hook I'd made at camp two summers ago, and stormed out the door, letting it slam behind him. A moment later, I heard his Pontiac squealing out of the driveway.
Ralph and I turned to stare at Mom. Carefully, she placed her paper napkin next to her plate. Without looking at either of us, she stood and walked toward their bedroom. Ralph and I glanced at each other, then he shrugged and grabbed the last piece of meatloaf out of the congealing grease on Mom's third best serving tray.
I mopped up the punch, but I could tell my white shorts were ruined. The first casualty.
Dad returned home very late that night, waking me
with the thud of his car door. Although I strained my ears almost painfully,
I didn't hear a word of my parents' conversation work its way through the
air vent on the floor next to my bed.
* * *
I had once asked my father how Uncle Antonio had died. Although everyone over thirty seemed ancient to me then, even I could tell that he was much younger than Great Grandma Baley, who'd died (of old age, Mom said) when I was seven.
Dad said he didn't know. "A war, maybe," he suggested vaguely. Afterwards, Ralph told me he'd checked, and saw that Uncle Antonio had a bullet hole through his heart. I knew he was lying, though.
Mom said that she thought his death was related to a doomed love affair. That seemed more likely to me, because he was very handsome, and he had an air of tragedy about him.
When he came to me in my dreams, he would never tell me what killed him. Instead, he'd relate long, boring stories about dead relatives I'd never met. Ralph could keep track of all these people, maybe because this used the same well-exercised part of his brain that stored batting averages and field goal percentages, but I never could. "Wasn't Giuseppe the one who left the priesthood when he fell in love with Carmelita?" I'd ask.
"No, no, no," Uncle Antonio would sigh melodramatically. "That was Giovanni. Giuseppe was cousin Teresa's second husband, the one who burned down the outhouse."
If I was patient, though, sometimes Uncle Antonio
would pass on an interesting, if stale, bit of gossip about his sister
Lorena, who'd been quite a scandal in her time. Before I woke, he always
thanked me politely for keeping him tidy.
* * *
Things remained quiet for several days after the opening battle. Mom and Dad spoke civilly to each other, at least in my presence. Ralph sprained his ankle during football practice. My progress reports arrived, and they were mostly good, except my French teacher complained that I talked too much in class, and I was only barely surviving Algebra. Uncle Antonio told me that Cardinis were notoriously bad with numbers. One of my forebears had nearly wiped out our lineage, as well as his entire town, when he miscounted the explosives he'd set in a quarry.
The lull at home ended, though, one day when I came from school to discover two coveralled workmen spreading drop sheets over the living room furniture. The couch and Dad's recliner had already disappeared beneath speckled shrouds. Uncle Antonio's left shoe was peeking out of the cloth that covered him, and I considered going over and tucking it in.
The younger painter turned and glanced at me, and he looked a little like my favorite actor from Battlestar Galactica. I ducked into the kitchen, where I made myself an American cheese sandwich on Wonderbread. I could hear Mom down the hall in their bedroom, singing to herself. She only sang when she was upset.
I was standing in the doorway, nibbling my sandwich and spying on Starbuck, when Dad came home. I don't know why he left work early. Maybe his precognitive powers could extend from the city all the way out to our house in the suburbs. The sight of the van in our driveway had blinded him, because he pushed right past me as if I wasn't there.
He swept into the living room, and for a long minute he just stood there, glaring at the square of dirty canvas that covered Uncle Antonio. The painters turned around on their ladders, paint dripping off their brushes and splatting on the tarps below. Dad reached out and gently wiped a speck of Sunshine Yellow off Uncle Antonio's shiny black shoe. Then he turned and brushed by me again, and silently went down to his basement workshop.
Mom was still singing.
I had just finished my sandwich when I heard a loud argument erupt between the painters. I peeked around the corner and saw them gesturing angrily at each other, and then I saw why. While Starbuck's section of wall was Sunshine, his partner's was definitely Mustard.
By the time the confusion had been cleared up, it was almost 5 o'clock, and the painters were talking about overtime. Mom sent them away after they promised to make up for lost time the next day.
At dinner that night, Ralph droned on about an upcoming game against Grant High. Mom and Dad only glared at each other over the spaghetti. I just re-arranged the noodles around my plate. I didn't feel well.
Before I went to bed, I sneaked into the living room
and folded the canvas back from Uncle Antonio's face.
I stayed home from school the next day because I had a temperature of 102º and a rash on my stomach. When Mom read the thermometer out loud to me, I had to hide my grin. I was supposed to have an Algebra test during fifth period. Mom brought me dry toast and ginger ale, and I spent the morning finding shapes in the textured ceiling and listening to my little brown radio.
Just before noon, there was a sudden shout, followed by a horrible thud. I sprinted across the house, forgetting I was sick.
Mom and Starbuck were kneeling in the center of the living room. Between them, the older painter writhed on the floor, holding his leg and groaning. His ladder was tipped on its side, and a can of paint was overturned, its contents puddling on the tarp like an enormous egg yolk. I just stood there in my Wonderwoman nightshirt until my mother noticed me and ordered me back to bed.
It turned out that his leg wasn't broken, only badly bruised. Starbuck called from the Emergency Room and told Mom he was going to have to drive his partner to his sister's house in Eugene, so she could help him recuperate. Mom would have to finish the job herself.
There really wasn't much left to do, but Mom discovered that the paint had dried on the brushes, hardening them beyond use. She had to go to the hardware store and buy more.
Dad came home from work in time to watch Mom clearing away the tarps. I was feeling well enough by then to eat a bowl of soup at the kitchen table. As he stood in the doorway, suit jacket over his arm and tie loosened from his neck, Mom frowned at him over an armload of canvas.
"Stop it," she hissed.
"He stays where he is," replied Dad.
They stared at each other until Ralph barged in the
door, demanding to know when dinner would be ready.
I was pretending the feather duster was a microphone and singing along with Olivia Newton-John. "Hopelessly devoted to you…"
"Why bother?" I jumped. I hadn't heard Ralph come up behind me. "Mom's getting rid of him anyway."
"She is not!" Fiercely, I started brushing off Uncle Antonio.
Ralph turned off the record player and switched on
the TV. I whispered to Uncle Antonio, "She is not."
On Sunday afternoon, Dad and Ralph were watching a Charlie Chan movie. I was sprawled on the green shag carpet, re-reading Anne of Green Gables and waiting for Mom to finish weeding so she could take me to the library. It was drizzling out, but that never kept Mom from her garden.
The doorbell rang, and Dad didn't look surprised, even after I opened the door and Grandma Cardini swept in. Mom did, though, when she came in the back door a moment later. Grandma gave us all hugs that smelled like roses and seasalt. Then she marked us each with a lipstick kiss that wouldn't wash off until Monday.
Grandma had a little house in California, but she only stayed there, she said, when the weather was dreadful everywhere else. The rest of the time she rumbled around the country in her elderly Volvo, searching for the perfect cemetery to be buried in. Periodically, she'd show up at our door for a visit. Generally, she would call first, but this time, she explained, our line had been busy for an hour. Everyone looked at me when she said this.
It was supposed to be Ralph's job to help Dad carry in Grandma's bags, but he was still on crutches, so I was recruited instead. It took us a half dozen trips before we had arranged all her suitcases and shopping bags and plastic grocery sacks on my bedroom floor. I never minded her staying with us because it meant I got to sleep on the couch and watch TV late at night, as long as I kept the sound turned low.
The whole family hovered around Grandma politely, getting her settled in Dad's chair with a cup of tea and some saltines. Nobody else was allowed to eat in the living room, but Grandma got a special dispensation. At last, she asked me to fetch her the smallest green suitcase. I skipped to my bedroom and back almost before she was finished speaking.
Grandma's presents always came in very useful. Eventually. The fun came in imagining when and how they'd be used. This time she brought Ralph a pair of pink cotton panties, which made him blush violently, and caused Mom and Dad to stare at him appraisingly. He quickly hid them under one of the piles in his room. I got a big ceramic mixing bowl, with a band of small painted flowers and a tiny chip on the rim. I would soon discover that anything I made in this bowl would turn out delicious. It still has a place of honor in my kitchen, where I use it when I want to impress my husband and kids. For Mom, there was a cardboard jewelry box, which contained a red toy sportscar. And Dad received a navy velour bag full of polished agates. For months afterward, I would pour these stones from hand to hand as I watched television.
But the suitcase wasn't quite empty. Grandma handed her cup and plate to me and, groaning loudly, pushed herself out of the chair. She reached into the bag's depths and pulled out a palm-sized book bound in cracked leather. Smiling fondly at Uncle Antonio, she unbuttoned his jacket and slipped the book into the inside pocket. Then she rebuttoned him and smoothed the wrinkles out of his lapels. She had once confided in me that he bore a strong resemblance to Grandpa Cardini, who was lost on a roller coaster when Dad was still a boy: when Grandpa's coaster car returned to the beginning of the track, it was empty. Nobody saw him again.
Throughout Grandma's visit my parents managed a careful truce. In any case, the redecoration couldn't proceed as long as I was sleeping in the living room.
I think we were all curious about the little leather book. I once caught Ralph appearing to be reaching into the pocket, and my brother jumped and pretended to be straightening Uncle Antonio's jacket. The temptation was worst for me at night, when I knew the book was only a few steps away. The smell of fresh paint kept me awake. I could see Uncle Antonio's coat buttons gleaming in the ray of moonlight that slipped in through the gap between the curtains. But he'd always seemed like a man who valued his own secrets, and I couldn't disappoint him by peeking.
Grandma had only meant to stay a week. She'd heard of a particularly scenic cemetery beside a river in Montana. Her car developed a sudden malady, though, and it took another week for the mechanic to track down the elusive replacement part. Eventually the Volvo was ambulatory again, and Grandma headed north, leaving behind a litter of empty paper bags and five kinds of cookies. Even Ralph couldn't keep up with her baking when she got in the mood.
The truce ended the moment Grandma walked out the door. The exhaust cloud from the Volvo was still visible over the driveway when Mom left on an unnamed errand. Dad ducked down into the basement, I assumed to rally his own forces. Like the spectators at Bull Run I set up camp in the living room with a book and a few illicit cookies.
Mom soon returned home with a mountain of fabric swatches. I couldn't help leafing through them, running my hand across the ones that were smooth or soft. I tried to talk Mom into a maroon velvet, which I imagined would look very elegant. She was not convinced.
Instead, she held various pieces of cloth against the wall. I was stationed at the dimmer switch and instructed to adjust the light levels up and down. But even though we found one pattern that matched Uncle Antonio's suit exactly, and another that we both thought looked just like stepped-in dog poop, nothing went with the Sunshine walls.
I could tell Mom was getting frustrated when she called Ralph in from the front lawn, where he was mowing. He was still supposed to be resting his ankle, but Dad paid him for yard work, and Ralph had a date planned for that night. He tracked mud and bits of grass through the house, looked thoughtful as Mom posed the samples in front of the wall, and pronounced that he liked the dog poop swatch. She sent him back out to the yard.
Mom spent the day bringing home fabric, testing it out, and then bringing it back again. She had returned from her fourth trip when Dad sauntered through the living room, whistling. "Maybe you should try repainting the walls," he suggested.
I'm pretty sure Mom missed him on purpose when she threw the swatchbook at him. It left a black mark on the wall.
Mom visited every fabric and furniture store in a 50-mile radius. After school she would lure me into the car with promises of layovers at bookstores and fast food restaurants. I had to help her lug around armloads of fabric.
Everything clashed with the new paint.
Mom didn't go anywhere for a few days, and Ralph told me she'd given up. Dad was less optimistic, though, and so he almost seemed to expect the large box that the mailman delivered that Saturday.
Mom pounced on the box and tore it open. Tiny bits of cardboard flew into the air and settled on her hair and shoulders. Triumphantly, she pulled out the perfect slipcover. Even Dad had to admit that it was attractive and it coordinated perfectly with Sunshine Yellow.
Ralph scowled, though. "I liked the brown one better," he mumbled.
The next day, Mom started looking at carpet samples.
* * *
Uncle Antonio visited me that night.
We sat across from each other on a wide, snow-covered plain, but it was warm out. People in old-fashioned clothing milled around, speaking Pig Latin. Uncle Antonio was wearing his suit, as always, but with a Sunshine Yellow carnation in his lapel. I was dressed as Wonderwoman. We were both sitting on my red cape. He looked particularly melancholy and tired, too, like Mom did when Grandma Baley was sick.
He held out his hand to me, and it held another carnation. I took it and tucked it behind my ear. He touched me softly under my chin, a thing he'd never done before.
I expected Uncle Antonio to begin one of his tales about my ancestors, but instead he pointed at a lovely young woman who had walked by us eating purple grapes. "Lucia," he sighed, "was never that beautiful. Her nose was too pointy, and she had crooked front teeth."
I held my breath, and Uncle Antonio and I lifted
off of the snow and into the sky. As he told me his story, we floated among
the stars on my Wonderwoman cape.
They'd met at a wedding.
She was sitting next to him, and he noticed her because she kept fidgeting. Sometimes the woman sitting on her other side (who turned out to be her sister) would poke her in the arm or gently slap her hand, and Lucia's fingers would still. A few minutes later, though, they'd be squirming in her lap again. When she caught Uncle Antonio staring at her, he grinned at her, and she smiled back.
He found her again at the reception. Between peals of thunder and gusts of rain that hammered against the roof, they spoke for a while, tactfully finding information about each other. He couldn't take his eyes off her hands, which were long and sensitive, and he knew they'd be cool and dry like cotton sheets in winter. By the time they left the reception, they were in love.
A week later, he called at the apartment she shared with her sister and her sister's husband. He brought her a pair of ivory gloves. She told him she loved him. Before he could exclaim his joy, she said she was already in love with a man named Franco, who worked with her brother-in-law at the shipyards. She wept and wrung her beautiful hands. Angry, he turned to go, but she reached for him, and when her pale fingers touched his palm he was lost.
Lucia told Franco about Antonio, of course. The men agreed to meet at a bar a few nights later. Franco was short and muscular, with a swagger and a ready grin. He was the sort of man who, without conscious effort, is always the center of attention. Antonio couldn't help liking him.
Over several glasses of beer, they decided to act civilized. They would both court her for three months, fairly and aboveboard. After three months, Lucia would choose one of them, and the other man would bow out gracefully.
She was skeptical of this plan at first, but together they charmed her into accepting it. The three of them worked out a schedule that was agreeable to all.
They showered her with presents neither man could afford. They gave her scented soaps and delicate powders, fancy handworked handkerchiefs and piles of gloves in satin and lace and velvet and silk. Together they gave her an opal ring that was too extravagant to purchase alone, because neither could sleep knowing it rested anywhere but her finger. They wrote, and then read her, bad poetry, and promenaded through two pairs of shoes each. One afternoon they dragged her to a studio downtown, where they each posed for a portrait with her. She kept the portraits on a doily by her bed.
The more time they spent with her, the more Lucia loved them both. How could she pick Franco's good humor over Antonio's intelligence, or Antonio's sensitivity over Franco's self-confidence? Her family and friends could only shrug helplessly when she sought their counsel, and her priest had no answers for her either.
On the appointed day, Antonio and Franco met at Lucia's apartment. Both men looked haggard and sleep-deprived. They carried lavish bouquets of roses from which they'd carefully stripped the thorns, so as not to pierce Lucia's porcelain skin.
Lucia was gone.
She had left each of them a note in her spidery script. Antonio could still smell her perfume lingering on his. She wrote that, faced with the impossibility of choosing between her two true loves, she had taken the only alternative and returned to her parents in Italy. She took their pictures with her, and she swore that she would love them both with all her heart forever.
Sadly, Antonio and Franco shook hands and went their separate ways. Antonio heard that Franco was killed soon afterward when a falling pallet at the shipyards knocked him into the water, where he drowned.
Antonio tried to return to his normal life. He rejoined the card games in the neighborhood tavern, and took his nieces and nephews to the zoological park and the seashore. He considered moving out west, maybe buying a little farm. He even flirted with the women who came into his brother's grocer's shop, where he worked.
But at unpredictable intervals every day, he could feel cool white hands tapping at his shoulder, tugging at his soul and pulling it east over the ocean. At first, this was only a distraction and an annoyance. But slowly, as his essence was stretched further and further, he began to grow weak.
When Antonio could no longer lift the crates of apples and lettuce, he knew he had to do something. Voices seemed to reach him only over a great distance, and they sounded hollow and strange. Colors faded to the browns and grays of the portrait he'd had taken. Instead of dreams, his sleep was filled with a restless and unrelenting blackness like the bottom of a deep cruel sea.
He consulted with doctors, but they could only shake their heads sadly. This, they told him, was a spiritual problem, and not medical. So he turned to priests, and when that didn't work, even clergymen of other faiths, who all told him to petition God for help. His prayers went unanswered.
He visited mediums and seers, who were unable to solve a predicament that involved only the living. He went to scientists and inventors, but none had a theory or a machine that could cure him. By then, he could barely walk, and strangers would bump into him on the sidewalk as if they hadn't seen him.
Swallowing his pride, he tried to contact Lucia, but her sister had moved, and Antonio didn't know where in Italy Lucia was. He thought of going to search for her, but even a trip across the street was too much for him. Desperately, he tried to drink himself free, but the alcohol only helped his soul draw away faster.
When Antonio became unable to care for himself he was installed in someone's parlor, with family members attending him when he seemed to need them. Eventually, they must have noticed that it had been a long time since Uncle Antonio had needed anything. By then, the room would've seemed empty without him.
Still young and smooth-skinned, Lucia eventually
fell to the influenza epidemic, but true to her word, she loved Antonio
even on her deathbed.
Uncle Antonio and I drifted for a while through the
sky. My cape rippled around us in the breeze. I tried to find the constellations
in the stars that shone through him, and I thought I saw a ship with a
billowing sail. He thanked me again for caring for him. His white teeth
gleamed under his dark mustache. Then he pointed at the ground and, looking
down, I watched green shag carpet growing through the field of snow.
* * *
One glance at the morning sky told me it would rain all day. Over french toast, Mom informed us that her friend Lois was coming over that afternoon to give carpet advice. I groaned: Lois had a hyperactive six-year-old who always destroyed one of my belongings. Last time she disemboweled my stuffed unicorn. Mom shot me a look and, sulking silently, I tore at the edges of the syrup label.
Dad toyed with his silverware distractedly. Surely he hadn't surrendered? But he wouldn't catch my eyes.
When Lois and Jenny arrived I barricaded myself in my room with a fresh pile of library books. It turns out that I was safe, however, because Jenny was captivated with the little red car that Grandma had brought. Even with my closed door I could hear her vrooming and honking her way through a Lilliputian Grand Prix.
Occasionally, Mom's and Lois's laughter would make its way to me, too. When she was with other grown-ups, Mom always sounded like a stranger. Hours later I emerged from my room and they were still talking.
Lois stayed so long that even Jenny grew tired and curled up for a nap under Uncle Antonio's table. Great Aunt Clara's husband had made the table in his garage, and I could remember playing under it myself when I was little, pretending it was a fort. Dad used to frown over the workmanship and talk about making a better one himself, but he never got around to it. I thought it looked uncomfortable, but Uncle Antonio never complained.
It was Dad's night to cook. He started rattling pots and pans meaningfully. Lois gathered up her daughter and a bag of Grandma's cookies (as if Jenny needed more sugar) and waded out to her station wagon. Mom lay back on the couch, happily exhausted.
A square of beige carpet covered her lap, and I knew the war was over.
Dad came to lean in the doorway. I expected more shouting. My parents were quiet, though, just looking at each other over my head. Then Dad smiled at me, making the corners of his eyes crinkly. I realized that he was older than Uncle Antonio was when he died.
The doorknob rattled and Ralph hobbled in, still sporting an Ace bandage. He'd talked Mom into loaning him her car for the afternoon. Her keys hung from his fingers like a war trophy. He dripped rainwater onto the floor.
"Hey," he grunted, taken aback to find us all staring at him. He sniffed the air. "Is that Dad's chicken I smell?"
"With Spanish rice," was Dad's reply. It was the family's favorite meal, reserved for special occasions and dreary days. I knew there would be a huge salad with Dad's homemade dressing, and strawberry ice cream for dessert.
Ralph made as if to toss the keys to Mom. She held up her hand quickly. "This is not a baseball diamond, Ralph. Bring them over here."
He must not have seen the little red car, hidden by the shag carpet where Jenny had left it. He stepped on it with his bad foot.
Like watching a slow-motion instant replay, I saw Mom's mouth open in a warning that came too late. Ralph flew across the room headfirst. Dad lunged forward, not quite fast enough.
Ralph landed with a thunderous crash on Uncle Antonio's chest. One leg of the table shattered instantly, and Uncle Antonio slid off the table headfirst, taking Ralph with him. My brother struggled to disentangle himself, knocking the leather book out of the jacket pocket. The book fell open on the floor beside him and something slipped out.
Ralph rolled off Uncle Antonio and lay panting on the carpet. The rest of us were frozen in place: Mom half-rising off the couch, Dad with knee bent and arm extended toward Ralph, and me gawking at them all.
Dad was the first to break the tableau. He knelt beside Ralph. "Are you okay?"
"Fine," Ralph groaned.
When Dad turned to pick up the mystery object, Ralph quickly scrambled up beside him. Mom and I rushed over, too.
It was a photograph.
From behind a hundred wrinkles and finger smudges, there was Uncle Antonio, smiling confidently in yellowed black and white. He was seated on a high-backed chair. It was impossible to make out the details of the figure that stood to his left, slightly behind him. But perfectly clear on his shoulder was a long, slender hand in a lace-trimmed glove.
I don't know why I acted next. Even at twelve I was the type to think things over first. Years later, my husband would complain that I was going to cogitate him into his grave. This time, though, I snatched the photo right out of Dad's hands. Ignoring my family's outraged shouts, I raced out the front door into the downpour.
I stood on the flooded lawn and held the portrait over my head like an offering. Cold rain poured into my eyes and down my T-shirt. In seconds, all that remained in my hands was a soggy wad of paper pulp. I dropped it into a puddle, and turned to see Mom and Dad and Ralph clustered open-mouthed in the doorway.
I stepped toward them and they parted wordlessly. They followed me as I walked to Uncle Antonio, my bare feet squelching in the carpet. Despite the awkward angle at which he lay among the splintered wood he maintained his air of dignity. His head was tilted in my direction and when I looked in his eyes I saw a flash of red cape and white snow. Then his eyelids closed.
The four of us stood over Uncle Antonio and watched
as he became more tangible than anything we'd ever seen, as if three dimensions
weren't enough to hold him any more. His hair and mustache shone with reflected
starlight, his cheeks and lips bloomed rose pink, and suddenly the room
seemed very small. I swear I saw the corner of his mouth twitch. And then
Uncle Antonio faded away like a chalk drawing dissolving in a storm. Soon
all that was left were the remains of the table, an old leather book that
turned out to be blank, and a crimson pillow some relative had sewn long
ago.
The pillow remained on the couch for several years, and when Mom and Dad finally replaced the old couch, the pillow was moved to the new one. By then, the walls were Taos Teal instead of Sunshine Yellow, and a big screen TV stood where Uncle Antonio once lay. Someone had misplaced the leather book.
Sometimes, when I look up at the night sky, I catch a ripple of movement from the corner of my eye like the flap of a cape or the flutter of a sail. When I turn my head, it's gone.