Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [34]
“Here comes Uncle Eddie!” Ellie shouts.
Angie can barely contain a groan.
Alice loves Uncle Eddie. Everybody else thinks he’s a fuckup.
Eddie was brilliant in school when he bothered to attend, especially math and physics. Could have done anything, won scholarships, the whole nine yards. Instead he got fat and runs a garage. Uncle Eddie can fix anything. It really burns everybody that he does well in his sideline business, too, buying high-end cars at auction for a client base that stretches across the country. Just how much does it bug Angie to see fat Eddie drive up in a vintage Mercedes he’s scored for one of his rich clients, smoking a big cigar, with cash in his pockets. Eddie loves cash.
All the pretty girls like Eddie. Even fat he’s really handsome, with lashes so dark and thick it looks like he’s wearing eyeliner. He’s had scores of girlfriends. Angie doesn’t like them coming over to the house anymore. What used to be fun and flashy and definitely out of the ordinary is now relegated to the despised favorite phrase of all boring adultdom: “not appropriate.”
Uncle Eddie also likes to disappear every few months for a week or so. Nobody knows where he goes. On a drunk, chasing a girl, proving he’s still free and unattached and unencumbered. Or maybe he’s just tracking down a vintage car he’s heard about through the grapevine.
Fastidious little miss Ellie is already starting to turn her nose up at Uncle Eddie. She’s imbibing Angie’s attitudes and opinions apparently. But his presents always wow her. Like Uncle Eddie always knows just what you really want, not what your mom thinks you should have, like the fringed cowgirl vest from his trip to Vegas, or the red, glittery Dorothy shoes with straps he bought one time in New York City. You can watch Ellie’s ambivalence play out right on her face. First, she’s loving the car and then she’s hating the cigar, then she’s loving Eddie’s booming laugh, but hating his big belly and his stubbly face and his grimy fingernails. When he picks her up and calls her pumpkin, she wrinkles her finicky little nose. He’s on to her, too. “Don’t be a simp,” he tells her. “What are you so afraid of, a little dirt?”
Angie is at the front door.
“Eddie, can you lose the cigar?”
“Hi, sweetheart.”
“Hi, Eddie. The cigar . . .?”
“It looks good, though, don’t you think?”
“Niiiice set of wheels,” Angie says.
Eddie does a little shimmy and shake. Right there on the sidewalk. Angie can’t help herself; she smiles at him, covering her mouth with her hands. He’s unbuckling his belt in preparation for dropping his pants.
“No! Eddie! It’s broad daylight!”
“I just want to get a laugh outta you.”
She’s laughing and shaking her head—who knows at who? Eddie? Herself? At the fact that she’s laughing at all?
“I heard your washer’s on the fritz.”
He reaches into the backseat and takes out his tool kit.
“So I’m gonna fix your washer and then I’m gonna take you out to dinner, gorgeous. Alice can babysit, right?”
“Why can’t we come?” Ellie wants to know.
“Oh, so now you like me?”
“I like you,” she says, a little too slowly.
“Your mom needs to put a dress on and go out someplace where she can turn heads and drink a martini. This is my big secret, the reason so many beautiful girls go out with me. I improve their looks. Next to me they look even more gorgeous than they already are.”
And then he’s inside their little house, bumping into doorjambs, knocking the pictures out of whack on the walls. When Eddie stumps down the basement stairs, the whole house shakes. Angie clucks, she actually clucks, but Alice thinks the house is doing a little happy dance, just like Uncle Eddie.
“I need an