Robinson - Part III

The siblings confront their uncle's grim decline, and the chaos he left behind.

The third installment of my short story, “Robinson.” In parts one and two, a pair of estranged siblings return to Robinson, a dying factory town marked by painful memories. While his sister believes they've come to pay homage to their family, the narrator harbors a devastating secret.

We get two rooms in Robinson’s finest hotel, then head down the street to have dinner at Robinson’s finest restaurant. We order from a laminated menu. I ask about the wine and I’m told there are two options- white and red. 

Alex shifts uncomfortably in her wooden chair. “But what kind of wine is it? The red?”

“The red wine…” the waitress pauses, her eyes drifting up, searching her brain for that elusive, scarcely sought-out information, “The red wine is, I believe, a merlot.” Her voice inspires zero confidence.

“We’ll do a bottle of the red,” I say. 

The wine gets better with every glass. And it helps us choke down the bowls of iceberg lettuce they’re serving in lieu of salads.

Alex orders the shrimp for reasons that are beyond me. It looks comically grotesque and I actually laugh out loud when the waitress sets it down in front of her. It makes her blush and I immediately feel bad.

I eat my small pizza—cheap mozzarella melted over cardboard— and drink my wine, smiling, while Alex works through her plate of wadded-up shrimp chum. She looks like she’s going to be sick, but she keeps eating. 

Halfway through our meal, the waitress comes over and asks, “How is everything?” and we say, “It’s fine, thanks,” because our parents raised us to be polite and suffer silently.

We smile at the waitress and snicker after she’s walked away, because it’s kind of funny, because it’s nice to be near each other again, and because we both somehow forgot what was in store for us when we decided to return to Robinson.

After dinner, we pick up a decent bottle of wine from the drive-through liquor store and head back to the hotel.

---

Mom and Dad had been gone a couple years when Alex got the call. Uncle Gary had taken a spill. He’d been out in the garage, migrating a 30-pack of Busch from the outside fridge to the inside fridge, when he’d slipped and fallen on the concrete, breaking his hip. The pain was awful and who knows what would have happened if his cell phone hadn’t been tucked in the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. Thankfully, he was able to call an ambulance. They gave him some medication for the pain and he was about to undergo surgery. He was just calling to let us know, to let Alex know.

“There’s something else,” he told her, hesitating a little.

“What is it?”

“Well, they say my liver’s got problems.”

“What sort of problems?”

“They’re saying it’s ‘severe cirrhosis’ and that I’ve had it for some time, even though I don’t have any symptoms.”

“Oh no.”

“Yeah,” he said, sounding dazed. “Doesn’t sound too good.”

We made plans to fly back to the midwest within a week and a half, but quickly moved the flight up after talking to Charlene, an old friend of Daisy’s. She’d been to the hospital to see Gary. His concept of “not having any symptoms” turned out to be a profound display of denial.

“His skin is yellow. Almost neon,” she told Alex. “It was hard to look at him at first. He’s got a long beard, down to his belly. He looks like ZZ Top. And his stomach, it’s distended. Like a Buddha belly. But he only weighs 100 or so pounds. He told the doctor he hadn’t been eating food or drinking water for at least a week, probably more. Just beer. It’s not good, Alex. You and your brother should get here quick.”

That last trip to Robinson would not end up being a quick one. Gary’s condition was serious enough that death was guaranteed and imminent. Gary’s own family had passed away some time ago, so we were all he had. 

The alcohol withdrawal subsided a day or so before we arrived. Charlene said it had been quite bad. Screaming and swearing at the staff, all varieties on the refrain, “Give me a fucking beer!” No one did and, by the time we showed up, he was docile.

His chapped lips smiled even as his eyes grew more and more distant each passing day. We made sure he understood his prognosis. He was going to die. There was no liver transplant in his future— the state required six months sobriety before a patient could even be put on a waiting list, and Gary wouldn’t last half that long.

The plan was to stay at Daisy and Gary’s house, but when Alex and I drove out there, we were in for a shock. Gary had let the place go to seed. The lawn had overgrown with weeds. There were several full-sized garbage barrels overflowing with crushed beer cans. Inside, more beer cans littered the floor— over 1900 cans, we would count, in all. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink, untouched for the better part of a year.

Alex had gleaned from her bimonthly conversations with Gary that he’d never slept in their bed again after Aunt Daisy died. But that wasn’t quite the whole story. No one had stepped foot in that bedroom for years. It was like a museum. All of Daisy’s clothes still hung in the closet. Her purse sat on a chair by the door, as if she’d just gone into the other room and would be back at any moment. 

You could hear vermin scattering around in the walls. There was a recently molted snakeskin on Gary’s workbench in the garage. Every surface was covered in dust or dirt and the house was pungent with the smell of beer, mold and body odor.

We began clearing out the house before Gary passed. At first, we did so under the pretense that he might be coming home someday, even if only for an afternoon. But he was never coming home. As that grew more and more apparent, we grew more and more aggressive in our cleaning. We hauled 30 bags of garbage and recyclables out of the house in two days, then another 30 bags over the following week. We donated boxes of Daisy’s clothes to Goodwill. We washed some of the dishes and just threw others away. 

We went to the hospital every morning. He wanted to die, though he never said as much. But I had seen the same look of surrender and grief in my dad’s eyes. There was nothing left for him here but the pain of remembering.

Gary died on a Monday and we coped by doubling down on our cleaning efforts. We found some strange things. We found almost two hundred dollars in loose change spread throughout the house, in drawers and bowls and boxes.  We found DVDs of pornography. We found a document outlining my Aunt’s wishes to have her ashes spread throughout the property. We found her ashes, in an urn, atop a TV in the living room.

We found several ounces of marijuana. We rolled a joint and shared it in the garage one night, toasting cans of Busch to Uncle Gary. It was the first night either of us had laughed in a long time.

---

Alex was named executor of the will and I worried that it would be too much for her. She had a demanding job and we had both already taken so much time off work. But she didn’t unravel. She never even lost her composure. 

The estate was left to the two of us and we found ourselves taking long walks in the woods, along the creek, entertaining the idea of keeping the land, of maybe even moving there, out into the middle of nowhere. But we knew that we’d never last more than a couple months in Robinson. The last three weeks had already taken their toll and I was counting the days until I could get back to California, back to my wife.

I told Alex I would support any decision she made. Maybe I was still hoping her sentimental nature would get the better of her, that she would make the unthinkable decision of hanging onto it all— the house, the artifacts, every last bit of it. But she didn’t.

“I need this to be over,” she said. “I need to move on from this. We both do.”

We agreed to sell everything.

---

We hired a man named George Banks to handle the estate sale. There would be an auction. The Harley Davidson, the cars, the house, the land, all of it. We wouldn’t get as much for it as we would selling it all individually, but we would get it over with.

George promised to take the entire burden off our shoulders. “You could leave town tomorrow if you wanted and we would handle everything from here on out. We hire the best contractors in Crawford County to do everything. We’ll finish cleaning the house, cataloguing the estate, mowing the yard, tuning up the vehicles. And then we’ll sell it all. I can promise you that. Every last pot, pan and bottle cap. There won’t be anything left over.”

We bought our tickets home that night. 

Our last day in Robinson was bittersweet. It was a perfect summer day as we pulled up to the ranch house for the last time. George Banks had made good on all his claims. Small crews of trained professionals had moved heaven and earth to restore the property to its former glory. The lawn had been mowed, the paths cutting through the woods had been cleared, the garage had been fully cleaned out-- though a snakeskin in the corner told us they hadn’t yet evicted the garage’s only remaining tenant. The property again looked like someone lived there, like someone had taken care of it.

We wandered around for the better part of an hour. For a few precious remaining minutes, this was still our land. But when we left, that would all be over. All of this would be gone, closed off to us forever. These cars they drove, these cushions they sat on. It would all be sold. Auctioned off to hoarders and opportunists.

My aunt had kept most of her parents’ possessions, heirlooms of our grandparents and their parents. Memories had mattered a great deal to Aunt Daisy. But she was gone now, and we didn’t want them. We couldn’t keep them. We couldn’t do anything with these memories, with this abandoned property. We could only sell it for a small sum and pay our bills and thank the ghosts of our family for buying us a new couch or a new car, for funding new memories that our own descendants might someday be cursed with and forced to discard. 

“I’m happy Dad never saw what happened here,” Alex said as we did our final walkthrough of the house. “It would have made him so sad.”

We walked from room to room, reminiscing when the spirit moved us. We both picked one trinket to take home as a keepsake. Alex chose a small wooden angel sitting on my aunt’s bedside table.

I took an old Zippo lighter from Uncle Gary’s workbench. 

---

I wake up and the lighter is staring me in the face. I must have set it on the bedside table before falling asleep, though I don’t remember. I shuffle into the bathroom and try to brush the wine stains from my teeth.

I bought a can of lighter fluid at the liquor store last night, sneaking it in the bag when Alex was distracted. I sit at the tiny plywood desk in the corner of the room and dutifully fill the lighter, its cotton absorbing and swelling until the fluid starts to drip out. I put the lighter back together and set it on the desk, standing open, upright.

I don’t how long I’m sitting there, staring at it, but when I hear Alex knocking on the door, it jolts me. I take a deep breath. This is it, I think.

Alex knocks again, louder. I pick up the lighter and slip it into my pocket. One way or another, these people will get what they deserve.

One way or another, this ends today.

---

Look for the final installment of Robinson in your inbox next Sunday evening.