A pounding on the door startled them all and Patrick immediately banged three times back. “It’s not going to, Maisie.”
“How do you know?” Her voice had never sounded smaller or more frail.
“Sir?” It was the flight attendant. “Sir, open up!” She was clearly not there to ask if they wanted chateaubriand.
“In a minute!” he yelled angrily.
“GUP?” It was Grant now, needing an answer to his sister’s question.
“Because I do.” And then he added, “Because I’m not famous enough to die young.” How’s that for the unvarnished truth? “Here. Splash some water on your face. You’ll feel better.”
More pounding on the door.
“IN A GODDAMN MINUTE!” He looked Grant in the eye; he was still standing on the toilet. “Yeah, I thwore, tho what.” He winked and Grant smiled.
He helped them wash their faces and dry their tears. Slowly he opened the door and ushered Maisie out before helping Grant jump down from his perch. Patrick looked at the frustrated flight attendant, who clearly did not earn enough to have to deal with the likes of them. She did not look like Dusty Springfield, she did not look like Petula Clark. She looked, in short, annoyed. “Sorry. Tooth emergency. We’re headed back to our seats.” Together, like a family of ducks, they waddled back to their row, Patrick’s blood pressure slowly returning to normal.
“Here,” Patrick said when they were situated in their seats. “Let’s look at my phone.” He pulled his credit card out of his wallet.
“But the Wi-Fi . . .”
“They fixed it. Didn’t you hear? There was an announcement when we were in the bathroom.” He mussed Grant’s hair and smiled as he handed over his phone. “Why don’t you show me what’s so great about YouTube. Just don’t . . . Guncle Rule number five: If a gay man hands you his phone, look only at what he’s showing you. If it’s a photo, don’t swipe. And for god’s sake, don’t open any unfamiliar apps.”
FIVE
The scream pierced the darkness and Patrick sat bolt upright. Jesus Christ. Again?! He had just drifted off to sleep in his own bed—finally—and was going to have to reason with these monsters that it was possible, preferable even, to grieve without causing one’s own ears, or (more to the point) someone else’s, to bleed. He jumped out of bed and ran smack into his bedroom door, forgetting he was still wearing his skin-rejuvenating, silk charmeuse weighted sleep mask. His own scream was deeper, annoyed, and mercifully brief.
He pushed the mask up his forehead. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust and confirm that, yes, after two weeks he was finally back in his own room. Yes, the air had just kicked on. Yes, the door was where it was supposed to be. No, this was not the dreadful hotel by his brother’s house. No, the noise was not drunken gamblers stumbling off the bus after a day at Mohegan Sun. He stepped out in the hall to find the source of the ruckus. Thankfully he’d had the foresight to sleep in gym shorts instead of his preference for, well, less. “Maisie? Maisie is that you?”
It wasn’t Maisie, but Grant, shaking in the hall outside the guest bath.
“What is it? Your mom? Your dad? Another tooth? What happened?” Patrick crouched down to put his arm around his nephew’s shoulders. He followed the boy’s gaze into the bathroom. “Do you need to use the potty again?” They had been through this once before bed. Grant said he usually had help “wiping” and Patrick stood back aghast; it was something Patrick didn’t even do for himself since he installed two eleven-thousand-dollar Japanese toilets (sorry, washlets) he’d read about in Consumer Reports.
“The toilet . . . moved.”
“What do you mean it moved?” He didn’t have the clearest view from his vantage point, but it seemed to be exactly in the place that it should be.
“The lid.” Grant finally mustered the courage to look at his uncle. “There’s a ghost.”
Up until now, their first night had mostly been a success. The kids were enamored with the house (“You have a hot tub?!”) and made themselves more or less at home. There was some awkwardness with their bedtime routine. Maisie thankfully showered herself, but Grant insisted on a bath, while bemoaning the lack of bath toys (the pool noodles Patrick had were too large for the tub), and there was a small meltdown about their uncle’s baking soda toothpaste being too paste-y. (He argued that children’s toothpastes with their bright colors and bold flavors probably caused cavities, but relented, saying he would buy one specifically labeled for kids.) Maisie and Grant agreed to share a guest room, at least to start, and Patrick laid in the king-sized bed with them, improvising an elaborate story about a roadrunner and a jackrabbit named Meep and Moop and their adventures in the desert. The kids complained about the metal sculpture that hung over the bed; it was too angular and Grant feigned a fear of rectangles. Neither of them knew their sleep numbers, laying waste to the guest mattress’s smartest feature, but eventually, exhausted from the day, they all nodded off. At some point before midnight Patrick awoke and extracted himself, even though he was surprised to find sharing was not horrifically unpleasant.
“Oh, no, no, no, Grant. It does that. The toilet. When you get close to it, the lid rises automatically. That’s what it does. It’s called a feature. You pay extra for those.”
“But there was a light inside.” Grant leaned in to whisper in his uncle’s ear. “Glowing.” He was clinging to his conviction that there was some otherworldly presence at play.
“A night-light. Isn’t that great? So if you have to use the bathroom in the night, you don’t have to blind yourself with the overhead light.”
“It’th not from another dimenthion?”
Dimension? Where do they learn these things? “No. Well, yes. But only Japan.” Patrick ran his fingers through the boy’s hair. “Where’s your sister? I suppose she’s awake, too?”
Maisie’s face appeared around the door, like she was one of the von Trapp children in a thunderstorm. Patrick bit his lip. God help him if he had to do a verse of “My Favorite Things.”
“Come here. I want to show you everything that my new washlet can do.”
Maisie crept forward in her cat pajamas. “What’s a washlet?”
“Well, it’s like a toilet. But better.”
“How do you know it’s better?”
“Because it’s Japanese and it cost more than my first car. Look, watch what it does.” Patrick stood up and approached the washlet. When he got close enough to trigger the sensor, the lid softly rose.
Maisie said, “Whoa,” while Grant still looked on with skepticism.
“And that’s not all. Check this out.” Patrick opened the drawer to the high-gloss floating sink cabinet and produced a remote control. The toilet lid lowered itself.
“Is that for the toilet?” Maisie asked.
“No, it’s for the washlet.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Well, if I have to explain it to you!” Patrick threw his arms up, exasperated. “First, there’s the sleek, porcelain design. Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“It looks like you keep dinosaur eggs inside,” Grant observed. And it strangely made sense.
“Yeah. Isn’t it great? It has ionized water, a UV light, music speakers, a heated seat, the aforementioned night-light to guide your way in the dark, and a twelve-setting wash and dry feature with”—he waved the remote in his hand to end with a flourish—“remote control. Ta-daa!” Maybe he could rewrite the song with his own favorite things. He sang to himself: Ionized water in remote-sensored washlets.
“It does laundry?” Maisie was confused.
“What? No. That’s disgusting.”
“But you said washer and dryer.”
“Wash and dry feature,” Patrick corrected.
“What does it wash and dry?”
“YOU! Isn’t that fantastic?”
“I don’t unde
rstand.”
“What’s not to understand?” He handed Maisie the remote so that she could see it and Grant nuzzled into her side to get a good look himself. The remote was covered in illustrated buttons; some, including one with an aggressive swirl that looked like a symbol the Weather Channel might employ for a Category 5 hurricane, Patrick hadn’t yet dare try. “Well, truth be told, I don’t understand all of it. That button right there looks needlessly hostile, and I think I read in the manual that this other one is for ‘front cleaning,’ and I don’t think that applies to boys. But you can give it a whirl and report back.”
“I have to pee.”
Patrick looked down at his nephew, who was holding his crotch. Of course. This whole midnight powwow was precipitated by something.
“Step right up, boy!” he said, summoning his best carnival barker, a sort of Pee Pee Barnum.
“Will you wait right here?” All this explanation and the boy was still scared. Patrick vowed to show him the issue of Consumer Reports so Grant could become more acquainted.
“Of course.”
Grant stepped into the bathroom, freezing in his tracks when the lid rose by itself.
“Go on! That’s its way of welcoming you.”
Patrick and Maisie turned away to give Grant his privacy.
“I still don’t understand how it washes you,” she grumbled.
“Oh. It has a retractable cleansing wand. That’s what the remote is for. When you’re done, you know, it squirts you with clean water and you can select the temperature and the pressure.”
“Squirts you . . . where?”
Patrick rubbed his temples, but Grant thankfully interrupted. “How do you flush it?”
“I got it, bud!” He leaned down, hovered his finger over the remote control until he found the right button, and said to Maisie, “Press that one,” and she did.
“Cooooool!” Grant said, his face over the bowl. “It’th lighting up again!” Patrick guessed he was over his fear of ghosts.
Maisie however was not as easily distracted. She still looked up at her uncle for an answer to her question.
“Where? You know. You’re going to make me say it? Your undercarriage.” Patrick felt like he was losing her. “Here, give me that.” He reached out and took the remote control and stepped into the bathroom. “Grant. Want to see something else really cool? Put your face over the bowl.” Patrick glanced over his shoulder to make sure Maisie was watching.
“What am I looking for?” Grant asked.
“Watch.” Patrick pressed one of the buttons and the cleansing wand slowly extended.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“What does it look like?”
“It looks like a robot.” Grant was transfixed.
“Keep looking.” Patrick studied the remote until he found another button to press and the wand spritzed water, squirting Grant in the face.
Grant screamed. And just as Patrick had hoped, Maisie laughed.
“You spwayed me!”
“Here, kid.” Patrick tossed Grant a hand towel and it landed right on his face.
“That’s tho gross!” He reached up, wiping the towel back and forth across his face.
“It’s clean water. It doesn’t come from the toilet. It comes from the wall. Just like the sink faucet.”
Grant pulled the towel off his head to consider this. His hair stood in a gratifying swoop. Slowly, a smile crept across his face. “Do Maisie! Do Maisie!”
Patrick expected an immediate protest but instead Maisie agreed it was a delightful idea. “Yeah, do me, do me!”
“Suit yourself, stand over the—” He didn’t even have to finish; Maisie’s head was already in position over the bowl and so he gave the button a good, long push. Maisie screamed as the water hit her right in the kisser and Grant squealed with rapturous delight. He hadn’t heard such laughter out of anyone in, he couldn’t recall. A long time. Once, when he first held Maisie (she was maybe three months old), she burst out laughing. He didn’t even know babies could do that—laugh—and even though he felt awkward holding her with all eyes in the room on him, he couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by this new bit of information.
“Now you! Now you!” Grant screamed, pointing at his uncle.
“Oh, no. There are enough nighttime serums and potions on this face to stock a Bergdorf Goodman beauty counter, so you don’t want to get it wet.”
“GUP!” Maisie protested, pronouncing his name with, like, seven u’s.
“Oh, all right, but just once.” He leaned forward only so far before activating the water. He’d done enough in the way of stage combat in college to act like he’d been hit in the face with a geyser, while missing the brunt of the stream. He threw his arm over his face as he retreated, spinning into the towel rack. The kids laughed and laughed and then he, too, broke down in fits of uncontrollable giggles. It was so stupid, but it was a release, a ray of sunshine bursting through the dark cloud they’d been under.
“My turn!” Grant roared, and he stepped forward and bowed over the washlet.
Patrick rolled his eyes. “Guncle Rule number six.” Just as Grant turned his neck to look up at his uncle, Patrick let fly with a jet of water, hitting him right in the ear. Grant squealed again, equal parts shock and glee. “Never let your guard down!”
“Me! Me! Me!” Maisie jumped up and down, begging for another go.
“Well, okay, but there is a drought. So let’s not go crazy.” But as Maisie stood freshly soaked, wiping water out of her eyes, Patrick realized washlet humor was a kind of toilet humor he could get behind.
When Patrick marched the kids back to their bedroom, Grant tugged on his shorts. “Uncle Patrick? The tooth fairy hasn’t come yet.”
The tooth fairy. Patrick had forgotten. He was now grateful for this middle-of-the-night interruption, imagining the epic morning meltdown that was in store if the tooth fairy failed to make her rounds.
“Aren’t you supposed to be asleep for her to come?”
“Yes,” Maisie answered before Grant had the chance to.
“Are you asleep now?”
“No,” Grant mumbled, admitting defeat.
“Well, then. I suggest you hop to it.” Patrick tucked them in before summoning his inner fairy and scouring the house for loot.
SIX
Maisie swiveled on a barstool as Patrick stood across the counter from her, waving a spatula. “What’s the matter? You haven’t touched your pancakes.” The seats were made of seafoam upholstery with a low walnut back floating on top of pneumatic height-adjusting chrome stands, a jackpot find from a local thrift store. Maisie languidly kicked her feet against them as if they were from Ikea and somehow deserved her scuff marks and replied with only a yawn.
It was almost two in the morning when they finally conked out, allowing Patrick to slide the tooth fairy’s offerings under Grant’s pillow, so he could sympathize with Maisie’s exhaustion if not her apparent lack of appetite. It was rare his modern kitchen was used for anything close to food preparation on one of Rosa’s days off (unless coffee, protein shakes, or cocktails counted as food); this should be an event. He even, for the first time, used the griddle that sat atop the duel-fuel, JennAir self-venting stove he was forced into purchasing when it became clear a hood would interrupt the flow of the open kitchen.
“You don’t eat breakfast? Are you doing intermittent fasting?”
“I don’t know what that is,” Maisie replied.
“Really? Everyone’s doing intermittent fasting it seems. What’s the problem, then?”
“Mom made our pancakes look like Mickey Mouse.”
Patrick shook his finger. “We’re not doing that.” Goddammit, Sara.
“She came! She came!” Grant tore around the corner holding Patrick’s Golden Globe statue. He hopped up on the barstool next to his sister
and plunked his prize down on the counter. “What is it?”
Patrick was horrified. “MY GOLDEN GLOBE?!”
“The tooth fairy left it for me.”
“Like hell she did!”
After the kids had gone back to bed, Patrick poured himself a nightcap while he waited for them to fall asleep. He remembered struggling with what to leave on the tooth fairy’s behalf. He might have even had a second drink, but there was absolutely no way, short of him being roofied, that he put his Golden Globe under Grant’s pillow.
“That’s mine. It has my name on it. ‘Patrick O’Hara, Best Supporting Actor—Series, Miniseries, or Television Film.’”
“Tho?” Grant’s eyes were on this prize and he wasn’t easing up.
“So? Is your name Patrick O’Hara? No, it is not. Have you been in a series, miniseries, or television film? No, you have not. You took that off my shelf and you know it.” He pried the statue from his nephew’s hands before the boy could get anymore of his sticky fingerprints on it. “If this house catches fire I’m saving this before either of you. You do not touch it. Understand?”
Grant bobbed his head up and down.
“Now, let’s go see what the tooth fairy actually left you.” He took Grant by the hand and marched him back to his bedroom with Maisie tagging along behind. He pulled something from underneath his nephew’s pillow and handed it to him feigning surprise, as if the reward had not come from his personal collection. “It’s a Playbill from the 2012 Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess. SCORE!”
Grant flipped through the program’s pages. “Where’s the money?”
“It’s better than money. It’s signed by Audra McDonald.”
The kids stood silent, the who? heavily implied.
“Six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald?”
“What’th a Tony?”
“Oh my god. You’re from Connecticut, so I can understand your not knowing what a Golden Globe is. But a Tony Award? You live right next door to New York!”
The Guncle Page 6