Your Uncle

"Yes," Lorenzo said.

The word landed in the little storage unit without anywhere for Clara to put it.

She read the inscription again. Julian holding his daughter, Clara.

"Then you're my uncle."

Lorenzo lowered himself onto an overturned plastic crate beside her.

"Yes."

She looked at his face. The gray eyes, the scar, the mouth that hardly ever smiled. Her employer. A man whose footsteps she recognized from another corridor because she always moved her cleaning cart out of his way.

Her uncle.

"Can we call him?"

The moment she asked, his expression changed.

Clara tightened her fingers around the letter.

"Lorenzo?"

It was the first time she had used his name.

"Julian died eight years ago."

She looked down at the photograph before he could see her face.

Eight years. She had been twenty. Her mother had already been gone for a year. She had been working double shifts at a diner then, hoping a bank balance with three figures might eventually become four.

Her father had still been alive.

"Where?" she asked.

"Portland. Maine. He'd lived there for years."

"How did he die?"

"A sudden illness. I can find the details for you. I don't want to tell you something wrong."

Clara nodded, although she wasn't sure what she was agreeing to.

There was a child in the unit next door complaining about a bicycle. A metal shutter rattled. The world continued doing ordinary things.

"Did he know?" she asked.

Lorenzo glanced at the writing.

"The photograph says he did."

"I mean later. Did he know I grew up? Did he ever ask?"

"I don't know."

She wanted him to have a better answer. She wanted someone, just once, to have thought far enough ahead to leave her the exact thing she needed.

Instead there was a photograph and a man who had spent almost as much time misunderstanding his family as she had.

Lorenzo reached into his pocket and offered a folded handkerchief.

"I'm not crying."

"I can see that."

She took it anyway.

"My mother used to tell me he was someone she'd loved when she was young. That was all. When I asked if he'd loved me, she said I hadn't done anything that could make someone not love me."

Her voice broke on the last word.

Lorenzo looked away long enough to let her wipe her face.

"That wasn't an answer," Clara said.

"No."

"I spent years thinking there must be something terrible about him. Or me."

"There was nothing wrong with you."

He said it firmly, without the uncertainty that had marked his other answers.

Clara pressed the handkerchief beneath her eyes.

"You don't know me."

"I know enough to answer that."

She couldn't speak for a while after that.

When she could, she read the rest of Rebecca's letter aloud.

Rebecca had loved Julian. They had been young and frightened of the life Matteo expected his eldest son to accept. There had been arguments, separation, attempts to start again. The letter didn't turn any of it into a beautiful tragedy.

I told myself I would explain when you were older. Then you were older, and I was afraid you would ask why I had waited. Every year made it harder to begin. That was my failure, sweetheart. It was never yours.

Clara laid the page across her knees.

"I was in the next room when she wrote this. Probably doing dishes."

Lorenzo didn't offer the comfort of saying Rebecca had done her best.

Clara was grateful. She loved her mother enough to be angry with her.

"What was he like?"

Lorenzo rubbed his hands together.

"Funny. Restless. He drew on everything. My homework, envelopes, restaurant receipts. He once painted my bicycle while I was asleep."

"What color?"

"Yellow. I was furious."

"Why?"

"I was fourteen. It had flames on it."

An unexpected laugh escaped her. Then she began crying properly, which was embarrassing and inconvenient, and Lorenzo moved the box of scarves out of the way so she could lean against the wall.

He sat there until she was ready to stand.

On the drive home, she stopped at a traffic light and looked at his reflection in the side window.

"Did you never see the resemblance?"

"You look like Rebecca."

"And the name?"

"I didn't know there was a child. Julian was twelve years older than me. By the time I understood what he and my father were arguing about, he'd already left. People stopped saying Rebecca's name."

"You believed that was enough reason not to ask?"

He accepted the question without flinching.

"At the time, I thought he had chosen to leave us."

"Maybe he had."

"Maybe."

Back at the cottage, Mia met them with blue icing on her wrist.

"I saved you a flower," she told Lorenzo.

He bent so she could put the small sugar rose in his palm.

"Thank you."

"You have to eat it."

He did. Mia watched his face anxiously.

"Is blue good?"

"Very."

Clara put Rebecca's box on the table. Looking at her daughter, she felt a fresh, almost unbearable awareness of all the questions a child trusted adults to answer.

She kissed Mia's curls.

"Did you have a nice afternoon?"

"Rosa let me stir."

It was enough for the moment. Clara let it be enough.

Later, after Rosa had taken Mia to wash her sticky hands, Lorenzo stopped at the cottage door.

"There's something I need to tell you before you hear it somewhere else."

Clara waited.

"Julian tried to contact me after our mother died. More than once."

"Did you speak to him?"

His gaze held hers.

"Not toward the end. I refused his calls."

Clara looked at the photographs on her table, then back at him.

"Do you know what he wanted?"

"No," he said. "And I can't undo that."