Uncle Earl came out to meet me, despite the rain. He’s not a terribly physically demonstrative man, but he hugged me and said, “It’ll be okay, Carrot,” while I snuffled on his shoulder.
I didn’t have that many boxes. Most of them were books. I have always been one of those who rhapsodized about the book as a physical object, but having to pack and carry the boxes was enough to make me want to throw over physical books altogether and just live on an e-reader.
I’d left Mark the furniture. I had no place to put it. I had my clothes, a couple of pictures I’d taken off the walls, my laptop, and a couple of coffee mugs. And refrigerator magnets. I had been collecting refrigerator magnets whenever I traveled anywhere, and damn if I was leaving my ex souvenirs of cities he hadn’t visited.
Uncle Earl wanted to help, but his gout was bad and he kept having to stop and rest his foot, so I pretended I was too tired to unload and just grabbed a couple essentials.
“Your room’s through here,” he said, once I’d gotten those out of the car. He limped through the back hall, which was hung with posters announcing the anniversary of the Mothman sightings—“Fifty Years of Terror!”—and a random assortment of small-animal skulls wired to a kayak paddle. (Why a kayak paddle? you ask. Look, if I could explain this stuff, it wouldn’t be the Wonder Museum, okay?)
My uncle may well have cleared out the room last year, but the coat of warm-yellow paint on the walls was brand-new. The room still smelled of it, even though a fan was in the doorway to blow some of the fumes out. The bed was an antique with elaborately lathed corner posts higher than my head, ridiculously imposing and faintly absurd, given that it was only a twin bed and had a green comforter decorated with little pineapples.
On the wall opposite the bed was the mounted head of a Roosevelt elk. Roosevelt elk are massive animals, nearly the size of horses, and this one had a rack of antlers like tree limbs. I took one look and started laughing in recognition.
“Oh my God! Uncle Earl, is that Prince?”
“You always were fond of him.” Uncle Earl sounded a trifle embarrassed. “Thought you might appreciate the company.”
I laughed again, walking up to my old friend.
When I was five or six, I saw Bambi, because this is a baffling thing that parents still do to their children. I had not cried, but I had stared huge eyed at the screen while Bambi’s mother died. But the figure that really impressed me was Bambi’s father, the Prince of the Forest.
(Incidentally, if you haven’t read the book, by Felix Salten, there is an incredibly weird scene where the Prince shows Bambi the body of a dead poacher to explain to him that humans can die, too. Everybody goes on about how disturbing Watership Down is as an animal book for kids, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Bambi.)
The next time I went to the Wonder Museum, I walked up to the mounted elk head and shouted, “Prince!”
My deer-identification skills were not strong at six. My mother, being that sort of person, explained that elk and deer were different species and this wasn’t the Prince.
Uncle Earl, being the sort of person he was, waited until my mother had gone next door and told me that elk were even greater princes of the forest than deer, and that this elk would be honored to be called Prince.
The next time I came back, the plaque next to the elk had been changed, and it now read:
“PRINCE”
Cervus canadensis roosevelti
Even at a young age, I was aware that he was doing this partly to be kind and partly to make sure both my mother and I could be right. At a much later age, it would occur to me that my mother had been Uncle Earl’s sister first, and he probably had a lot of experience in working around her inexhaustible need to be correct in the face of adversity.
It was good to see Prince again. I hugged Uncle Earl. “You didn’t have to do this. Thank you.”
“It’s what family’s for, Carrot. Anyway, I’ll work you hard while you’re here. Don’t you worry about that.”
He tried to look stern and failed miserably. I excused myself to go to the bathroom and only cried a little while I was in there, mostly because of the kindness, and a little out of sheer relief.
* * *
I went to bed early, exhausted from the drive and the emotions, and slept like the drugged dead. I didn’t even get up to use the bathroom.
I woke up and did not have even a moment of confusion about where I was. The last few weeks, sleeping in the living room, I would wake up and stare at the ceiling and wonder why I wasn’t in the bedroom, and then the divorce would come crashing back down on me all over again. But here I woke up, and even though it was dark, I smelled paint and I saw Prince’s antlers in the thin sliver of light from the door and I knew exactly where I was.
I had to fumble for my cell phone to see what time it was. Eight fifteen. Early for me, but if I was going to help run the museum, I had to get used to getting up early. We opened at nine. I got up, showered, threw on clothes, and padded out to the front, where Uncle Earl was setting up the point-of-sale system.
“Morning, Carrot,” he said. “I brought doughnuts.”
I looked over at the box of Krispy Kreme and reminded myself that I was back in the South, where our cultural food is deep-fried. Sure, great wars are fought over the proper sort of barbecue, but everybody finds common ground on the hush puppies. And Krispy Kreme. It’s as close to a religious pilgrimage as you can make in this part of the country. (Go a bit farther south and Graceland fills this ecological niche, but not in the Carolinas.)
I took a doughnut and bit into it. It was made of air and glory.
“You want to run next door and get us some coffee?” asked Uncle Earl. “I’d go, but…”
I took note of the way he was sitting on the stool and got a suspicion that it wasn’t just gout bothering him. His back was straight, and I could see a brace under his clothes.
“Back bugging you, Uncle Earl?”
“It’s fine.”
“Fine like it’s fine, or fine like it hurts like hell but you don’t want to complain?”
His lips twitched. “Well, more like the second one. Went out on me a few weeks back. Still twinges sometimes.”
“Jeez. Didn’t they give you meds?”
He shrugged carefully. “The ones that work make me foggy. Always afraid I’ll fall asleep in front of the customers.”
I paused on my way out the door to get coffee. “Well, if you want to take one tomorrow, I’ll be here and make sure you don’t.”
I almost expected him to turn me down—Uncle Earl would let you cut his leg off rather than complain—but he said, “I’d like that, hon,” and I had a sinking feeling that he was in a lot more pain than I thought.
* * *
The Black Hen coffee shop next door was ostensibly owned by a woman named Martha, but her brother Simon was the barista. I assume he got off shift at some point, but I never saw him leave. Simon was interesting. He dressed like a thrift-store Mad Hatter, with fingerless gloves and strange hats. He looked exactly the same now as he had the last time I had been here, five years ago, and exactly the same as he had when I’d first met him, nearly a decade ago. Simon had to be nearly forty, if not older, but he looked about eighteen. Somewhere, a portrait was probably aging for him.