Free Boy Minus Girl by Richard Uhlig

time farther away. In the north a falling star streaks across the horizon. I point and say, “Look, make a wish.”
    “A funny thing happened between my old man and me,” Uncle Ray says, lost in his memories. “Toward the end of his life I think he came to respect me ’cause I stood up to him, ’cause I did my own thing.”
    “Unlike my dad,” I say.
    Uncle Ray looks at me, surprised.
    “Your dad’s a decent, hardworking man,” he says. “Nothing phony about him and nothing wrong with that. Thing is, your dad and me are, well, we’re just very different people.”
    “Dad’s a total pushover.”
    “Maybe. But he’s that way for a reason. Y’see, our old man broke his will. Roger never stood a chance. After all, he was
Roger Eckhardt Jr
. He was going to be the town doctor come hell or high water.”
    After a moment I say, “Uncle Ray, Dad doesn’t get me at all. And he doesn’t care if he gets me, either.”
    Uncle Ray looks at me and I explain: “It’s like he doesn’t even see me. He works all the time, and then when he’s home, he’s staring into a newspaper or fooling with his ham radios. I mean, five months ago he told me he’d build the Chinese vanishing box for my magic act and he’s hardly touched it.”
    “Your old man, he loves you very much,” says Uncle Ray. “He’s just busy.”
    “Why are you defending him?” I snap. “You’re never around. You don’t know anything about what it’s like to be stuck with them.”
    “You’re right,” he admits. “I don’t know nothin’ about that.”
    “Someday I’m going to run away and get a real life in a real place. And you know what? Dad won’t even notice I’ve left.”
    “You really believe that?”
    I nod. “I know it. He’ll just go on with his ham radios and his patients and his doomsday scenarios and it’ll be like I never existed.”
    I’m on my fifth taste of beer and feel a small headache coming on.
    Uncle Ray stands and scurries off into the grass. “I gotta piss.”
    Another falling star in the north. Another wish?
    “Shit! Jesus! Yowza!” Uncle Ray yells.
    Heart pounding behind my eyes, I call out, “You all right?”
    “Hurts like hell whenever I piss lately!” His back to me, he is leaning over, clearly pained. “Goddamn it, I better not have the clap again.”
    “What’s that?” I ask.
    “Never you mind, Mo-lester, just never you mind.”

    A
tap
-
tap
-
tap
wakes me.
    The sun burns painfully through my bedroom window, and I pull the blanket over my eyes. Never again will I touch beer, I promise myself. My brain pounds like a marathoner’s heart and my tongue feels like sandpaper.
    There’s that tapping sound again. “Les,” Dad says in a soft voice.
    I lower the blanket and squint. Dad stands in the doorway. “Your mother and I need to speak with you downstairs,” he says, throws me a weighty look, and shuts the door.
Do they know about last night
?
    I swallow four Bayer aspirins and stagger into the kitchen, where Mom and Dad are seated like the stone-faced judges at Nuremberg.
    “Have a seat,” Mom says.
    “We want to talk to you about your uncle Ray,” Dad says in a low voice.
    Uh-oh.
    “Now, don’t get us wrong, Ray’s a great guy in many ways,” Dad says. “He’s got a good heart and he’s a lot of fun and, no doubt about it, he’s lived an exciting life. . . .”
    “But the fact remains,” says Mom, “your uncle Ray hasn’t exactly been a responsible person.”
    “He bounces around from place to place—which, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” Dad says.
    “But he’s never settled down, never planned for the future. Never really grown up.”
    “And your mother and I fear he’s a poor role model for you.”
    Why has it taken Uncle Ray’s coming here for Dad to notice me?
    “You’re a smart boy,” Dad says, gripping my shoulder. “As long as you take what he says with a grain of salt, you should be fine.”
    I roll my eyes and head back to