swerved across three lanes of a four-lane highway and hit them head-on. The drunk survived, as they so often do. My uncle (also my father, as it turns out) was in New York when he got the news, making the rounds of several Christmas parties, schmoozing publishers, editors, and writers. His agency was brand-new then, and Uncle Harry (dear old dad!) was kind of like a guy in the deep woods, tending a tiny pile of burning twigs and hoping for a campfire.
He came home to Arcola—that’s a small town in Illinois—for the funeral. After it was over, there was a reception at the Conklins’. Lester and Norma had been well liked, so lots of people came. Some brought food. Some brought booze, which serves as godfather to a great many surprise babies. Tia Conklin, at that time not long out of college and working at her first job in an accounting firm, drank a good deal. So did her brother. Uh-oh, right?
After everybody goes home, Harry finds her in her room, lying on her bed in her slip, crying her heart out. Harry lies down beside her and takes her in his arms. Just for comfort, you understand, but one kind of comfort leads to another. Just that once, but once is enough, and six weeks later Harry—back in New York—gets a phone call. Not long after that, my pregnant mother joins the firm.
Would the Conklin Literary Agency have succeeded in that tough, competitive field without her, or would my father/uncle’s little pile of twigs and leaves have fizzled out in a little runner of white smoke before he could begin to add the first bigger pieces of wood? Hard to say. When things took off, I was lying around in a bassinet, peeing in my Pampers and going goo-goo. But she was good at the job, that I know. If she hadn’t been, the agency would have gone under later, when the bottom fell out of the financial markets.
Let me tell you, there are a lot of bullshit myths about babies born of incest, especially when it comes to father-daughter and sister-brother. Yes, there can be medical problems, and yes, the chances of those are a little higher when it comes to incest, but the idea that the majority of those babies are born with feeble minds, one eye, or club feet? Pure crap. I did find out that one of the most common defects in babies from incestuous relationships is fused fingers or toes. I have scars on the insides of my second and third fingers on my left hand, from a surgical procedure to separate them when I was an infant. The first time I asked about those scars—I couldn’t have been more than four or five—Mom told me the docs had done it before she brought me home from the hospital. “Easy-peasy,” she said.
And of course there’s that other thing I was born with, which might have something to do with the fact that once upon a time, while suffering from grief and alcohol, my parents got a little closer than a brother and sister should have done. Or maybe seeing dead people has nothing at all to do with that. Parents who can’t carry a tune in a tin pail can produce a singing prodigy; illiterates can produce a great writer. Sometimes talent comes from nowhere, or so it seems.
Except, hold it, wait one.
That whole story is fiction.
I don’t know how Tia and Harry became the parents of a bouncing baby boy named James Lee Conklin, because I never asked Uncle Harry for any of the details. He would have told me—the dead can’t lie, as I think we have established—but I didn’t want to know. After he said those two words—I am—I turned away and walked back into the care home to find my mother. He didn’t follow, and I never saw him again. I thought he might come to his funeral, or turn up at the graveside ceremony, but he didn’t.
On the way back to the city (on the bus, just like old times), Mom asked me if something was wrong. I said there wasn’t, that I was just trying to get used to the idea that Uncle Harry was really gone. “It feels like when I lost one of my baby teeth,” I said. “There’s a hole in me and I keep feeling it.”
“I know,” she said, hugging me. “I feel the same way. But I’m not sad. I didn’t expect