“That’s not fair, Uncle Dylan.”
“No,” Gupta chimed, “it is not.”
“Welcome to life on earth, fellas. What’s fairness got to do with anything?”
“When I was a kid,” Zak said, “I thought fairness meant everything to you. I looked up to you because of that, because you were so different from my dad. Money didn’t matter to you. What was right mattered.”
“Money’s easy not to care about when you haven’t got any. Fairness and what’s right don’t even count in horseshoes.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this from you, Uncle Dylan. Uncle Josh used to tell me stories about you.”
“What stories?”
“About you in the old neighborhood and how the other kids respected you for doing the right thing all the time. Even my dad admires you for how you used to stick up for Larry Feld and his family.”
“Your dad hates Larry Feld and thought his family was crazy. And as for my brother Josh, he was the one who bestowed upon me the title of family fuck-up.”
“Well, I guess I’m no longer a pretender to the throne, am I, Uncle Dylan? I really am the family fuck-up now.”
That punch got through and it hurt like a son of a bitch. I knew Zak and Guppy hadn’t meant for anyone to get hurt, certainly not killed. Hadn’t I done an incredible amount of impulsive things and used love and desperation as justifications? But people had been killed and there was no escaping the bloody trail that led to my nephew’s hideaway.
“Okay,” I said. “If we’re going to keep Valencia Jones’ ass out of prison and mine off death row, we better get to work figuring out just how. We can save the recriminations for our next family meal. Agreed?”
They were glad to sign on for that. I told Guppy to get his coat back on, he was going to meet an ex-cop in the mens room of the Manhattan Court Coffee House.
“What if Mr. MacClough should be suspicious of me?”
“He already is. .” I hesitated. “What should I call you, anyway?”
“Raj, Rajiv, Guppy… What you call me is of no significance, Mr. Klein. I will know you are speaking to me.”
“Jesus, how did I know I’d get an answer like that? Like I was saying, MacClough is already suspicious and when he hears about Kira’s murder, he’s gonna be very tense about being approached by a stranger. Just tell him that I hate brandy, even Izzy Three Legs Weinstein’s. He’ll understand.”
Reimbursement
We sat there together for what seemed hours, not talking, avoiding each other’s eyes. I cleaned lint that wasn’t there, checked a watch I wasn’t wearing, looked for dirt under my clean nails. It was the first awkward time in our lives as uncle and nephew. We had always been a team, Zak and me, two men cut from the same pattern. There had never been any attempt to deny it. The poor kid really did look and sound like me, though Zak lacked the Brooklyn patois. He further lacked some of his uncle’s hard edges and street smarts. Before today, I had felt that was to his advantage. He was less suspicious, could see the sun sometimes behind the clouds.
I remembered when I was living back in Brooklyn, working my first insurance jobs for Larry Feld. I let Zak-he was only a little guy back then, three or four-tag along with me for the day. But it was safe and easy work that Saturday. All we had to do was take a few Polaroids of cracked sidewalks and dangerous intersections for Larry. We were on Kings Highway when Zak got hungry and told me he had to go winkies. Walking back to my car when we were done eating, Zak tugged my hand and asked me: “Why are you doing that, Uncle Dylan?”
“What am I doing, Zak?”
“Why do you slow down all the time and look at your face in the store windows?”
He was exactly right. I did stop and stare, but I had never given much thought to the reasons why.
“I don’t know,” I recall saying. “I guess I slow down to let the people pass. I don’t think I like it when people get too close behind me.”
He looked at his hand in mine and then up at me. “It’s okay for me to be close, Uncle Dylan?”
“You? Always, kiddo. Always.”
Sure, it was cute, but that’s not why it had stuck with me all these years. On that day I realized Zak had the power to make me look at myself in ways and at times I would have never thought to look. He was like a part of me that could step outside myself and hold a mirror up to the dark places I avoided. And now he was doing it again, holding up the dark mirror.
“You expected me to come,” I spoke to Zak, “didn’t you?”
“Hoped, Uncle Dylan, not expected.”
“But you had my favorite beer in the fridge.”
“My favorite, too.” He hesitated, then asked: “Are you still mad at me?”
“I’m still mad at everyone, from your father to my agent, from Grandpa to MacClough. I was born mad, you know that. You weren’t, Zak. It’s one of the really good parts about the differences between us.”
“I get mad, really mad.”
“There’s a big difference between getting and being,” I said, “a big fucking difference.”
“I guess.”
“Go upstairs and get us a couple of our favorite beers. When you come back, I think there’s some stuff we need to explain to each other.”
He went first. He told me about Kira and their brief affair and how they agreed they were better off as friends. Zak’s recap of his first meeting with Valencia Jones was right in line with what she had said. Zak was self-aware. He knew he was a sucker for sadness and Valencia Jones had sadness to spare. And though Riversborough College was allegedly a bastion not only of liberal arts but of liberal thinking, Valencia Jones was almost an immediate outcast. She was black, unspectacular to look at, and as soon as word of her parentage spread through the campus, she was designated a persona non grata.
That was all my nephew needed to know. Zak didn’t fall in love with Valencia Jones so much as adopt her cause. Oh, they liked each other well enough, fought through the awkwardness of sexual inexperience together, and went to the movies a lot. Zak was her defender, her confidant. Having met her, I got the feeling she rather needed the confidant more than the defender. Their relationship began to unravel when many relationships do; they were getting bored. You can only play sir knight and damsel in distress for just so long before it gets a wee bit tedious. It was Zak’s idea for them to move in together. Stepping back and letting go was not something the Kleins-all the Kleins-did with any ease. Valencia Jones had balked at first, but gave into the idea out of a sense of obligation. Even Zak could see how he had set them up for a big fall.
Just before the Spring break, Valencia Jones begged out of the arrangement. Although he fought it, in true Klein tradition, Zak agreed to the split.
“It was my fault, Uncle Dylan.”
“It’s been my experience that it takes two to make or break a relationship.”
“But that’s not what I mean,” he barked. “I was the reason she got arrested. I arranged for her to go to Cyclone Ridge.”
I choked on that. “I don’t understand.”
“I was feeling shitty for the way things had gone with us living together. Val really needed to get away from me. I knew that. She was going to go down to Daytona with the rest of the college-aged world, but I talked her into finally trying skiing. She always said she wanted to try it and I had promised to take her sometime. We just never got around to doing it. So I called up there and made a reservation for her. The students at the school get a special discount. You can check, I even paid for it with my dad’s credit card.”