by Dale Peck
The night before Dale Peck Gorman arrives the son dreams that he has awakened in his great-uncle’s dairy barn, and as he runs down the milking alley the cows follow him with their dark eyes and wet mouths. When he wakes up he is standing in front of the washer and dryer outside the basement room where he had been sleeping on a row of twin beds with his father, stepmother, sister, sister’s boyfriend, and his cousin Misty, daughter of his father’s youngest sister, Priscilla. It is the first time in his life he has ever walked in his sleep, and he stands next to the washer and dryer for a long time, heart pounding half from fear, half from exhilaration. He has slept-walked! He has walked in his sleep! The cows’ faces come back to him, their blank stares less menacing now. He wonders if the images come from Hull Farm, or his Great-Uncle Wallace’s, which he visited when he was four or five. There is something vaguely pleading in the cows’ direct gazes, but he will not think of it again until he sees his father’s half brother the following day.
A few hours later the morning dawns humid but cool. The son can see fog through a window in Uncle Herb’s basement, where the rest of his family still sleeps on their barrackslike row of single beds—except for his father, he sees, who wakes with the dawn. The son gets out of bed quietly, slips into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and to kill time walks a mile or so down the road his Great-Uncle Herb lives on, a mile back. As he approaches the house he sees an extra car in the driveway. Florida plates. To distinguish the three Dales from each other, they are referred to jokingly by the family as Florida Dale, Kansas Dale, and New York Dale, and now the son—New York Dale—examines the short man in a short-sleeved plaid shirt and low-slung jeans who is only just now getting out of his car. He has a bit of a belly but he’s still a lot thinner than Kansas Dale. Nearly bald on top, with a slightly blobby nose that fits right in with all the big Dundas noses surrounding him. The woman next to Florida Dale has a helmet of black curls sprinkled with gray. She is shorter than her husband, a slim woman in thick glasses. Her husband wears glasses too, and his eyes are wide and blank behind them, a little needy, a little scared.
The son thinks of the nicknames as signs like the one in front of Uncle Wallace’s farm, alluding to history and yet excluding it as well, names like locked boxes that tell you what’s inside without letting you touch the contents. All the Dales started out in New York, but it would take more than one book to tell you how they ended up in Kansas, Florida, down in the city, how they all came to be standing on a freshly mowed lawn in front of a tan brick ranch-style house outside of Rochester. Though there are six people on the lawn as the son cuts toward them—his father and his stepmother, Uncle Herb and his girlfriend, Dale Peck Gorman and his wife, Dot—the son still feels someone is absent, and he is surprised when he realizes the person he is missing is Gloria Hull.
It’s like looking in a mirror, he hears Dot say as he comes up. Nobody seems to notice his approach.
The son’s father and his father’s half brother stand face to face. The father is a heavier man, more fat but a lot more muscle too, but their features are the same. Not identical, but filial. The son watches as the two men look at each other through nearly identical square-framed silver glasses.
Been waiting a long time for this, Dale Peck finally says.
Been waiting my whole life, Dale Peck Gorman says, and on the last word his voice cracks and he throws his arms around Dale Peck’s shoulders.
The son watches as Dale Peck lets himself be held by Dale Peck Gorman. It’s good to finally meet you brother, he says, his voice light, his words meaning no more than what they mean. He holds his brother for a moment, and then he lets go.