What felt like a full minute of silence passed. Will settled his eyes back on his shoes. “Thanks, Uncle Jack,” he finally said, but it sounded thin and obligatory.
Jack took another deep breath and both of them could feel the awkwardness of why they were there creeping back in between them. “I also came here to give you something.”
Will looked up. “What’s that?” He assumed it was money. Money his mother wouldn’t let him keep. Money his father never would’ve allowed him to take.
Jack smiled, but this time his smile was his own — not Will’s dad’s. It filled his whole face with the kind of mischief Will’s father just didn’t possess. “Follow me,” he said, and stood up. He walked down the steps and toward a Suburban parked at the end of the driveway and fished the keys from his pocket. Will hesitated and looked over his shoulder into the laser-hot stare of his mother. He didn’t know how long she’d been back in the doorway. He felt the tug of her eyes telling him to keep his butt glued to that step, but he got up anyway. He brushed at his pants the way the fat man had and defiantly followed his uncle to the truck.
Jack walked behind the Suburban, double-tapped the key fob, and stood back as the hatch opened automatically. He disappeared from sight, shuffled some things around in the back, and then emerged holding a large white rectangular cardboard box. Will waited by the front of the truck, keeping himself in clear view of the front door. He didn’t want to give his mother a reason to come outside and ruin whatever this was. Jack seemed to understand. He tucked the box under his arm, tapped the key fob again, and the hatch slowly lowered back into place. He walked right past Will and returned to the porch. He set the box down on the steps and took a seat next to it. Will imagined every pair of eyes in the house joining his mother’s in curiosity, but he also imagined that interest died almost immediately when Jack reached down, lifted the cardboard lid from the box, and pulled out some of its contents.
Comic books.
How old did his uncle think he was? Will had given up comic books years ago. He liked girls and cars these days. Comic books all but guaranteed he’d never get a shot at having either. His uncle was a fool if he thought he could just show up here after all this time, say a few nice things about Will’s dad, and then try to buy his affection with a box of old comic books. He looked at his uncle with a mix of disappointment and confusion. It was Jack’s turn to see his brother in his nephew’s face.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said.
“Do you?”
“Yeah, you’re thinking that your loser uncle must be out of his mind lugging out a box of comic books to impress a teenager who is clearly light-years ahead of this kind of thing, right?”
“Maybe not the loser part.” Will walked back over to stand next to the porch. “But I am fifteen.”
“Well, Methuselah, these aren’t just any comic books.” Jack handled a few of the flimsy yellowed paper comics the same way Will’s mother handled her nana’s antique dishes. “These,” Jack said, never taking his eyes off what he was holding, “are your father’s comic books.”
Now Will was really confused. His dad had never owned any comics. He hadn’t even read regular books. It just wasn’t his thing. As far back as Will could remember, his dad had never even read a newspaper. “Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack,” Jack said. “Me and your dad used to collect these together. The X-Men, Daredevil, Green Arrow, The Flash, Tales of Suspense.” He paused on one of the books in his hand, and Will thought his uncle might start to cry again. “And Batman,” he said. “Damn, your dad loved him some Batman.”
“You’re kidding me right now, right? This is some kind of joke.”
Jack looked mildly offended. “I would never kid you about something this important, Will. On my honor.” He held his free hand up, palm out. “When me and your old man were boys — when we were friends — these were his prized possessions.” He carefully placed the books back in the box. “Every last Wednesday of the month, if all our chores had been kept up, your nana would give us each a Susan B. Anthony dollar and we’d walk all the way down to Franklin County to the Stars and Stripes Drugstore. The only place we knew that carried all the latest issues. We’d get two books apiece with those dollars and we’d swap them back and forth all the way home. Sometimes we’d even act out the stories in the backyard.”
Will still looked skeptical. “It’s a little hard to picture my dad doing anything like that.”
“Well, he did. In fact, he loved them even more than I did. He always said he wanted to write comics when he grew up. That was his dream.”
“So what happened?” Will asked, even more bewildered. He noticed his mother had disappeared from the doorway.
“The same thing that happened to almost everything back then. I ruined it.”
“How so?” Will sat back down and tried his best not to look interested in the fragile box between them.
“We got a little older. I guess I was about your age and your dad was a year ahead of me. I started becoming the asshole you see before you now and I began to treat the whole comic book ritual as ‘uncool.’ I started hanging out with losers and smoking cigarettes while your dad kept himself buried in these things.” Jack tapped the box. “He tried to get me interested again from time to time, but I wasn’t having it. I was too cool. Eventually he just gave up, and without having me or someone else to share all this with, it held less and less magic for him, I guess. Until finally he put all his books in this box, and into the attic they went. He never talked about them again — not to me, anyway. When your nana finally got sick of me always getting in trouble and kicked me out of the house for good, I stole them. I thought I could sell them to a collector or something down the road for some quick cash, but every time I tried, I could never bring myself to go through with it. After a while — when money stopped being an issue for me — they became something else.”
“Like what? What something else?” There was excitement in Will’s voice. Not a lot, but enough for Jack to notice.
“I know this is going to sound corny to a big fifteen-year-old kid like you, but this box of comics became a symbol of the last good thing I could remember about your father and me. It was like there wasn’t just a bunch of old comics in there, but more like our childhood — our brotherhood — was still alive inside this box. I began to think the reason I could never get rid of them like I planned was because, someday, they would be the thing that brought us back together. I started to imagine that one day we would be old men on a porch somewhere — maybe this one — looking through all this stuff, and as we remembered the comic books, we’d remember each other. I don’t know, I just thought if we sorted through these, we could finally sort through all our shit, too. I always thought there’d be enough time. I was wrong.”
“But why get rid of them now? I mean, they still mean something to you, right? They still remind you of my dad, right?”
Jack’s face stoned over. “Yeah, they do. And that’s why I’m not getting rid of them. I’m giving them to you. It’s like I said, I always thought they would bring me and your father back together someday, but I screwed that up like I did almost everything concerning our family over the years. Now that he’s gone, I finally get it.”
“Get what?”
“The real reason I held on to them for this long. It was so I could get them to the person who’s now their rightful owner.” He put a hand covered in silver rings on Will’s bony knee. “I don’t want to waste any more time. I don’t want to screw this up too.”