Max reached delicately into the tangled knot of Benji’s rant and tried to pull free a coherent thread. “Not what?”
“Brag!” Benji pounced. “My God, you won a motherfucking Grammy. Talk about burying the lede. A Grammy!”
Max demurred with a lopsided smile. “So did Milli Vanilli.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t be self-effacing. It’s annoying to those of us who have no hope of winning a Grammy. Or anything else, for that matter.”
Max could practically see the circuits of Benji’s mind light up with the accomplishments of a boy half his age, with what Benji took to be a real and glitteringly incomprehensible lack of vainglory, surging with data that didn’t compute. Benji closed his eyes and rubbed his temples as if fending off a headache. “Do you know what I’d do if I won a Grammy? I’d solder a pin to it and wear it as a brooch. Who leaves that out?”
“Should I have said that before or after, ‘Hey, we’ve never met, but guess what? I’m your nephew!’? You’d think what a douche bag.”
“Are you kidding? You come out of the gates on a Thoroughbred, you don’t run the race like you’re riding a donkey. Trust me: I have the opposite problem. I’ve spent my life riding a donkey like it’s Secretariat.” Benji scratched his head as his own metaphor sunk in. “Now I see why your mother got so worked up.”
The night before, with Evelyn finally calmed, if still undone by her “spiteful, hateful, lying children,” Max painted a portrait of Jim and Amanda Davis that was as vivid as it was unflattering. Jim, an inventor by trade whose greatest contribution to date — a coffee mug that displays the temperature of the liquid inside it — had yet to find a public wider than SkyMall shoppers, spent the bulk of his days in the family’s basement, waiting for inspiration to pave the way to an idea as necessary and immortal as the light bulb. Amanda, on the other hand, made her name as the most exacting violin teacher between Buffalo and Syracuse. She had all the pedagogical subtlety of a Russian figure skating coach who had been forced off the ice in recent years by an ever-worsening case of rheumatoid arthritis. Where Jim was scattered and removed, Amanda was focused as a despot. Ever since Max could remember, his mother-cum-manager had set her son’s priorities, apportioned his time, ruled his life with all the rigor of a totalitarian regime. Until finally, at the age of twenty-two, he packed up his cello and said, “Enough.”
The Fishers were sympathetic when he revealed that Amanda had not only kicked him out of the house but also thrown gravel at his car as he drove away.
“Because you wanted to come here?” Evelyn asked.
“Because I wanted to come here. Because of a lot of things. Because I’m taking a break from playing for a while. Because I said I’m gay in a national magazine. Because I took her Mercedes. I don’t know what she found more unforgiveable. My career suicide, as she calls it, or her stolen car.”
A whining Nissan turned onto Palmer Street, breaking the morning quiet and putting past in a plume of toxic exhaust. Max and Benji looked up. It was the color of dried blood, beat up and toaster shaped, with illegally dark windows and a decal of a delinquent Calvin peeing on the rear windshield.
“I don’t suppose that’s her?” Max asked.
“She’ll be here,” Benji answered.
“What were you saying? About my mother?”
“I can see, I said. Now that I know everything you’re giving up, I can see why she’s having a fit.”
“I’m not giving up anything. I get to keep the Grammy,” Max said, but Benji, who had seemed so game over guacamole and virgin margaritas the night before, was no longer in a kidding mood. “I’m giving up being a bear on a unicycle,” Max added more pointedly. “That’s what I’m giving up.”
Another car, a serviceable white sedan, approached the house and passed it by. Max watched it coast to a stop at the end of the street, disappointed, relieved.
“Why a bear on a—”
“The main attraction at the circus,” Max answered absently, his attention still fixed on the taillights burning like the red eyes of some mythical and retreating beast. “I’m tired.”
“Tired of the king of Denmark throwing roses at your feet?”
This Max ignored. “I’d like to see my boyfriend for more than three days a month. I’d like to conduct. I want to do something that’s my own. Like write music of my own. That’s what I’d like to do. Write music of my own instead of spending my entire life playing somebody else’s.”
“As if that’s the worst thing in the world.”
The warming sun wrung the smell of last night’s rain from the air. The eaves, dripping loudly, pit-a-patted into beds of hostas that bordered the front of the house, while across the beaded lawn, like a scarf dropped during the storm, a ragged knit of fallen orange leaves. “I don’t mean to give you a hard time,” Benji said, throwing an arm around his nephew and pulling him close. “It’s just hard for me to imagine walking away from anything I was so good at. I can’t walk away from acting, and I’m not very good at it at all.”
“I’m not giving up music.” As Benji loosened his grip, Max rocked back into his own sovereign space and said, “Maybe she changed her mind?”
“She’ll be here. I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“I don’t know. She didn’t sound too happy about the whole thing. And by ‘the whole thing’ I mean me.”
“Sounding happy has never been Claudia’s strong suit. She gets it from our father. You can’t take it personally.”
“I don’t. I read this book called Birthright about, you know, adopted people looking for their birth parents. I knew she might want nothing to do with me before I got into this.” He held up a hand to stall Benji’s interruption. “And you don’t need to tell me everything’s going to be fine.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you were.”
Benji zipped two fingers across his lips and let Max go on.
“Whatever happens with Claudia, even if she gets here and tells me to go away, I’m glad I came.” His voice snagged on a need he couldn’t name, deepened with emotion. “I’m glad I met you,” he said. “And your mom. Though she doesn’t know what to make of me either.”
“Are you kidding? The closest she thought she’d ever get to having a grandchild is complaining she didn’t have one. You’re like Christmas to her.”
“I don’t think a twenty-two-year-old is what she had in mind.”
“Give her time. Give them both time.”
“You didn’t need time.”
Benji shrugged. “I’m like a dog: one sniff and my heart is yours.”
“Your basic emotional whore?”
“Pretty much. Besides, being an uncle is easier than being a parent. Uncles buy cotton candy. Parents have to make sure you eat your peas.”
“Those days are over.”
“You’re never too old for cotton candy. And you may not need to hear it, but it is going to be fine. Claudia’s going to love you. I’ve known you less than twenty-four hours and I love you.”
“You don’t know me well enough to love me,” Max said. “I could be a grifter for all you know.”
“Are you a grifter?”
“No.”
“Even if you were. She’s your mother. How can she not love you?”
Max was awed and shaken as another self — one with a different parentage, a different provenance — began to take shape before him. He wanted to believe what his uncle said was that simple: mothers love their sons. Benji’s philosophy on this point may have been as nuanced as a tenth-grade biology book, but Max hoped to throw a switch deep within Claudia, at the level of her genes, and watch maternal devotion blaze forth, unwavering and immediate. It should have been that simple, but darkness hung at the end of the path, a shadowy bend around which he could not see.