Free Son of a Gun by Justin St. Germain

going to shoot, and then I look closer and there’s nobody there.” His bloodshot eyes flared wide. “I was about to kill nothing.”
    “Should I join the army?” I didn’t typically ask my uncle for advice, but I thought that maybe if we dragged our feet enough, the sun would go down and we wouldn’t be able to finish the fence, and Mom would either forget about it or make Ray do it.
    “You can have a good time, man.” He chuckled and looked off into the middle distance as if he were remembering another story. “I got to go all over the place, Germany and Europe. But there’s always somebody telling you what to do.”
    That evening, after we’d finished working for the day, I walked down the hall of our trailer and found the bathroom door closed. I was about to knock when from inside I heard the squeak of a rubber band as it cinched tight, and then the telltale slapping. Soon there was a long sigh, and the toilet groaned as he slumped backward against the tank.
    I sold him out. I didn’t want my sketchy uncle shooting up in my house, so I told Mom what I’d heard. I came home from work a few days later and Tom was gone. I bet Ray did the talking when they kicked him out, and I bet he enjoyed it. Forthe rest of the time we lived there, I thought of my uncle every time I passed that slapdash fence, and wondered where he was, if he was all right.
    The service ended. I tried to dodge the groping hands of the congregation to find Tom. He was hard to get hold of, with no steady phone number or address, and if I lost him then, I might not see him again for a long time. I thought I saw his Mohawk parting the crowd, and I called his name but he didn’t stop. By the time I shrugged my way outside, he was nowhere in sight. I asked Grandpop and Josh if they’d seen him and they said no. I walked around the side of the church to the back, where a giant rosebush canopied the yard: I thought Tom might have gone there to be alone. But he’d vanished. I went back inside still feeling the weight of his hand on my shoulder.
    In the aisle of the church, Tom’s children—Leighanne and Sean and Eric, the three who had survived—were talking to my brother. I went over and hugged Leighanne, the oldest and my mother’s favorite. The kids had lived with us on and off growing up, whenever the state took them away from Tom, and my mother often said Leighanne was like the third child she’d never had.
    Leighanne kept glancing toward my mother’s urn, still sitting on the altar beneath the empty pulpit. I hadn’t seen her in a while, and I’d always thought of her as a little girl, but she’d suddenly become a teenager, willowy and pretty, red-haired and pale and preternaturally mature. Her face was calm and her eyes were steady; she understood. There would be no more weekends at Aunt Debbie’s, no more horseback rides. Her brothers were younger, nine and eight, respectively, and they didn’t seem to get it, kept fiddling with hymnals and casting restless looks around the room. I thought of their olderbrother, Tom Jr. I was about their age when he died; it was my first inkling of death. My mother answered the phone one day and listened for a few seconds before hanging up and bursting into tears. She sighed deeply, sat me down, and tried to explain in terms I could understand. If I could have remembered how she’d put it, I might have been able to explain her death to my cousins. I could have told them why they were standing in a church surrounded by adults, why their father had hurried away, why people kept looking at a brass box when they said my mother’s name. But in order to do that, I would have had to grasp it all myself.
    There was no burial afterward. We had decided to put her in the family plot in Philadelphia, and Grandpop was taking the ashes back with him to be buried later. After the mass, Bob and Connie invited us over to their house. As we pulled into their driveway, I eyed our old trailer next door, the spot