I’m in a local restaurant here in Beaufort when my brother Charlie is born.
Mom and Dad are with me. Alicia’s also present, as well as my sister Megan’s entire family.
It’s Thanksgiving weekend, the eatery’s packed, and—understandably—service is slower than usual.
After a wonderful few days—during which Dad had joyfully and repeatedly declared, “This is best Christmas ever!”—his Alzheimer’s is going dark. The dreaded disease is threatening to speak to the restaurant manager about what Alzheimer’s perceives to be a personal assault on the honor of our entire family: the check has not promptly arrived and we’ve finished eating.
My sister and mother are at the other end of the table trying to bargain with Alzheimer’s, while my brother-in-law, Aaron, Alicia, and I are doing our best to distract my young nieces from the ugliness.
After munching through a good portion of her chicken tenders, Brexley is flat-out refusing to eat her side-serving of grapes. “Nope,” she keeps saying when prompted to consume just one. My niece wrinkles her nose as though grapes are somehow beneath her, but—despite her best efforts to be regally off-putting—she comes across as simply huggable.
We’ve all been indulging in some holiday eating. Entire sacks of salt and sugar. The grapes are just about the healthiest option any of us has seen since the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was on TV. As my father’s Alzheimer’s keeps raising its voice at the other end of the table—“This is ridiculous! I’m not going to take this anymore!”—these words fly out of my mouth: “Hey, Brex, I’ll tell you one huge family secret for every grape you eat.”
Brex jerks her head back and blinks several times from under raised golden eyebrows. “I only have to eat one grape?” she says, checking to make sure she has the uncle-niece legalese correct. “And you’ll tell me a big secret?”
“Yep,” I say, wondering what I’ll do if she actually takes me up on the bargain.
Big sister Isla is listening—her eyes wide, which alerts me to the fact that this is a make-or-break-it moment. If I want to be an Uncle Hall-Of-Famer at the end of my career, I’ll have to deliver now. Big time. I feel it. My nieces feel it. For good or bad, this interaction is going to be on my uncle highlight reel.
A devilish grin blooms across Brexley’s face just before she pops a grape into her mouth, chews, swallows, slaps her hands on the table, and leans toward me with her chin jutting out.
“How did you get her to do that?” Aaron asks, because his youngest had been refusing to eat her grapes for at least a half hour.
“Uncle novelty,” Alicia says, gravely undervaluing my heroic campaign for avuncular greatness.
“Now you have to tell us a family secret,” Isla says, crossing her arms and cocking her head.
While there are plenty of things my nieces don’t yet know about our family, none of these “secrets” are appropriate for children. I’ve painted myself into a corner and my nieces can sense it. Brex holds up a second grape between her thumb and index finger, and says, “One grape, one secret.”
"He’s not going to tell us anything,” Isla says, shaking her head.
I can feel my Uncle-Hall-Of-Fame first-ballot chances slipping away, so I reach deep inside of myself, searching the depths of my soul for something that is both child-appropriate and exciting enough to compel more fruit consumption.
I falter.
“Tell me a secret!” Brexley says in a way that’s supposed to be command-y and threatening but ends up landing cute enough to make me literally sigh with delight.
Oh, the elixir of childhood innocence.
Genius strikes.
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