SAM.
Jude smiled at Sam.
Sam smiled at Jude.
Jude’s smile was better than Sam’s.
Sam remembered the first time she’d smiled at him. It was Christmas Day a decade ago and Sam was ornery when he opened the door. Bad enough he was forced to wear itchy pants that bunched at the crotch, but to add insult to injury, his mom, Brandi Rose, made him put on a tie.
“Put on a tie,” she’d said. Just like that. She had curlers in her hair and smelled of the perfume that had appeared mysteriously in a glass teardrop on the bathroom counter.
“Hurry up.” She swatted his arm as she squeezed past in their comically snug hall. Sam studied her as she shambled into the kitchen and tried to see her as a man would, as a woman. She looked haggard. The broken blood vessels around her nose had been covered with a thick powder that aged her.
“What tie?” he shot back. At no point in his eleven years of existence had anyone thought to buy him a tie. She huffily pulled one from his dad’s stuff that was collected in Walgreens bags in the hall closet and threw it at him. It was green and maroon with musical notes at the bottom.
“Do you even know how to tie a tie?” she shouted, switching on the vacuum.
“Obviously,” he yelled back.
He YouTubed it.
It used to be that Sam’s mother spent her days off from the hotel in her room, dead to the world. But these past few weeks had been ominously different. She’d spent days baking, cleaning, and buying holiday decorations they couldn’t afford. Her nervous energy made Sam watchful, though it had been oddly reassuring to see the kolaches arranged on cookie sheets—prune and apricot. There were also spiced stars, Zimstern in German, that made the air fragrant with cinnamon, reminding Sam of happier times. Like the one Christmas they’d spent as a family with a shitty plastic tree and a few of his dad’s vinyl records wrapped in newspaper for Sam underneath.
They hadn’t celebrated the holidays for years, and he could tell from Brandi Rose’s short temper and the tremble in her hands that she was at least sober for once.
Sam loosened his tie as he answered the door. Brandi Rose wasn’t big on communication, and other than the barb about the tie and instructions to look nice, Sam didn’t know what she had planned. He hadn’t been expecting company. And certainly not a kid. Let alone a smiling blond, seven-year-old girl in a blue velvet dress and a ponytail. The kid had the same horse face as the stern, brown-haired guy next to her. His eyes were dark, as cold as holes, and behind them was Brandi Rose’s new boyfriend, Mr. Lange. He held a red satin bag aloft with a bottle of champagne peeking out of the top. His smile faltered only for a second when he saw that it was Sam.
“Merry Christmas, kiddo,” bellowed Mr. Lange.
“Hey,” said Sam.
Mr. Lange was sixty-nine years young. It’s how he’d described himself to Sam when they’d first met, grinning and waggling his eyebrows at the mention of “sixty-nine.” He was Brandi Rose’s fiancé as of a month ago. Sam had met him exactly once during their alarmingly short courtship. They’d gone out for steak dinners at Texas Land & Cattle, and the crypt keeper kept touching his mom’s knee. Sam wondered if his hand felt like twigs and dry leaves, especially since Mr. Lange had wiry white hair on his knuckles.
“She’s a spitfire this one,” he told Sam, stroking his mother again on the thigh. They’d met at the front desk of the Marriott, where Brandi Rose worked and Mr. Lange often stayed. “Old-fashioned, too. Wouldn’t give me the time of day until she saw I was serious.” He’d lifted her hand for Sam to see. A teardrop-shaped emerald sparkled on her ring finger. Her birthstone. Brandi Rose giggled, a foreign, hollow sound that horrified Sam.
“This is Drew, my son,” Mr. Lange said, patting the other man on the shoulder. “And my granddaughter Jude.” Sam nodded evenly.
“Oh,” sputtered Brandi Rose, appearing behind him. Her voice was strangled, higher pitched than usual. “You said you were picking us up . . .” She evidently hadn’t expected company either.
“You’re not Sam,” interrupted the kid. Apparently he and his mother were in the presence of three generations of geniuses. The men wore suits. Sam pulled on his tie again.
“It’s my fault,” said Drew, shooting his hand out to Brandi Rose by way of a greeting. “I insisted.”
She took it and Sam instinctively stepped toward Drew to buffer his mom.
“We were having Christmas lunch at the Driskill,” Drew explained, casually pointing out that Sam and his mother hadn’t been invited to the fancy hotel restaurant. “And as you can imagine, the notion of a complete stranger marrying my father just didn’t sit right with me. I had to see what his new lady was about.” He said this in an affable manner that belied its implication. That he suspected Brandi Rose was a gold digger.
“Oh,” said Brandi Rose again. Sam fought the urge to slam the door.
“You’re way too little to be my uncle,” whispered Jude.
It was trippy how memories worked. Sam couldn’t dredge up a solitary detail from Thanksgiving Day two years ago, or what he’d done this past New Year’s, yet he remembered everything about when he and Jude met.
The little kid wouldn’t shut up. Mr. Lange and Brandi Rose made short work of the champagne, and Drew parked Jude in Sam’s room with a plate of cookies while the “grown-ups talked.”
Jude’s family was loaded. At seven she had her own iPad and phone, as well a bag of “travel-size games.” And as much as Sam wanted to ignore her, she wouldn’t stop yammering.
“Do you know how to play backgammon?” She set up the pieces on his bed. Sam cranked up the music in his shitty headphones and turned his back in response. Until the yelling really got going. That’s the thing about mobile homes. The walls were wafer thin. Jude’s eyes widened.
Sam sighed, plugged his headphones into Jude’s iPad, and put them on her. He showed her a few videos. Heavy hitters like corgis waddling on a trampoline and baby pandas squirming to a medley of dancehall music. There was a supercut of a cockatoo that played piano with its feet, and once Jude settled into an instructional of a woman making cupcakes resembling acid-washed jeans, Sam checked on his mom.
Through the crack of his door he could see Brandi Rose at the sink alone, drinking a tall glass of orange juice that likely contained as much vodka. The men were out of sight though not out of earshot. For the next hour Sam and Jude watched videos. By the end of the afternoon Sam could tell a kind of resolution had gone down. He hoped the wedding was called off. That Mr. Lange’s impetuous proposal had been the handiwork of a senile man and his jerk son had in fact saved the day. They weren’t quite so lucky. The happy couple married a few weeks later, with a five-day honeymoon cruise on the Mayan Riviera. Despite the joyous nuptials and the infinite promises, Brandi Rose’s husband failed to move them out of their trailer home; nor did he ever spend a night in her bed.
When it came time for the Langes to leave, Jude’s dad collected her, took out his wallet, removed four twenty-dollar bills, and tossed them on Sam’s bed, not once looking directly at him.
He shut the door without a word.
• • •
“Uncle Sam!” trilled Jude.
Five years of extensive orthodontia and a contraption known as reverse-pull headgear had corrected the more equine aspects of Jude’s face.
“Hey, Jude,” he said. It was unsettling to see her again. They’d had coffee a month ago, when she was in town for orientation, yet at no point in the following weeks did Sam believe she’d leave California to study six blocks away.
Jude was now five ten to Sam’s six foot (okay, five eleven and a half), but whereas Sam was scrawny, Jude was solid. She reeked of health in that sun-kissed West Coast way. Sam bet she could bench-press him if she wanted. He felt both strangely protective of her in a mammalian way—like how he imagined people in normal families felt toward each other—and deeply uncomfortable that she’d be hanging around.
“YAY!” Jude squealed, engulfing him. “It’s Uncle Sam!” She’d taken to calling him that on the flurry of texts signaling her arrival. She thought it was hysterical since Sam wasn’t exactly the “USA! USA!” type. Nor was he her uncle anymore. Brandi Rose and Mr. Lange’s doomed union lasted just under two years. A month before he’d owe alimony, he proposed to a twenty-five-year-old server from a Cracker Barrel in Buda. He was a class act through and through.
The pressure of Jude’s tanned arms encircling him was pleasant, a relief. It had been several months since Sam had been embraced with uncomplicated affection, and his ex-niece was like a gigantic golden retriever that loved you on sight.
“You hungry?” he asked, squirming out of the hug. “How was the flight? Are your folks here? How’s it feel to be a freshman?”
Then a beat. “Do you love questions?”
Sam awkwardly fixed his hair and took a slug of coffee to have something to do with his hands.
“Caffeine’s a helluva a drug,” she said, eyeing his cup.
He laughed.
“To your first question: I’m starving,” said Jude. “Flight was good. Parents couldn’t agree on who should bring me down, so we settled on nobody. They’re splitting up.”
“I’m sorry.”
Sam had met Jude’s mother only once—she was tanned and wore yoga clothes to dinner—and Sam had never warmed to her dad.
“It’s fine,” she said, and gave him a crooked smile. “They were miserable. By the way, they say hi.”
“No they don’t,” Sam said.
Jude laughed.
“Well, my mom does,” she admitted. “But my dad did ask about you. Whether or not you had plans to go back to school.”
Sam shrugged. “We’ll see,” he said. Sam was going back, just not to UT.
“Well.” She grabbed his forearm. “At least he won’t be visiting. He may have been born in Dallas but he still thinks Austin is for drug addicts and trust-fund hippies.”
Sam smiled dryly.
“Oh,” Jude continued. “And I don’t know how it feels to be a freshman, I love questions, and my first order of business was coming to see you to say hi.” She served up another of her trillion-watt grins and waved right in his face.
“Hiiiii!” She was such a cartoon.
“Hi back,” Sam said, and busied himself with a plate of pastries. “I made these for you.”
“Whoa, for me?”
“Donuts and cherry hand pies,” he said.
“Wait, you made these?”
He nodded.
“Jeez, I’m going to be over here all the time,” she said. “I can’t believe you bake.”
“Well, they’re fried,” he said. Sam wondered what constituted “all the time.”
“Even better.” Jude pulled out her phone. “I’m going to tell my friends to come by.”
Sam nodded.
Jude was good about that sort of thing. Sharing and sometimes oversharing. They’d been thrown together at family functions a few more times and he’d eventually grown to enjoy her consistent stream of conversation. It was a nice respite from the rancor of the grown-ups, and even after the split, Jude never allowed Sam to lose touch. And he’d tried. Jude remembered birthdays and sent silly messages at the holidays with unsolicited updates from her life. Her congeniality was unflappable. Sam meanwhile had no idea when her birthday was ever since he deleted all his social media accounts.
“Do you want a coffee or something?” he asked.
“Iced please.”
“Milk and sugar?” Another fact he didn’t know about her.
“Tons,” she said, beaming.
• • •
“Yaasssssssssssss!!!!!”
A tall brown-haired girl dressed as if she were attending a desert festival galloped in, trailed by someone bearing an uncanny resemblance to the tiny Asian girl from the Japanese horror movie The Grudge.
“Yasssssss!!!” shrieked Jude back, hugging the brunette as the tassels on her shirt jangled.
“Bitch, finally!” yelled the taller girl. Their long knobby limbs reminded Sam of king crabs clasped in an embrace.
The Asian girl smiled at him for a second, then changed her mind. He responded with a grimace.
Jude untangled her tanned arms and lunged for the shorter girl.
“Hiiiiiiiiii,” sang Jude into her hair, practically lifting her off the floor. “Yay, it’s Penny.”
The girl patted his niece’s back twice—pat, pat—and locked eyes with him helplessly.
“This is my best friend, Mallory,” Jude said. “And my roommate, Penny.”
“So, you’re Uncle Sam,” said Mallory, reaching for his hand. She had a firm handshake. The sort that quickly became a contest.
“I’m Mallory Sloane,” said Mallory Sloane.
“Pleasure,” he said, refusing to acknowledge her grip. She bit her lower lip in a seductive manner. Sam smiled and quickly said hi to the other one. She waved at a spot slightly left of his ear.
“So, what can I do for you ladies today?”
“Can you make me a flat white?” asked Mallory, who kept her sunglasses on inside.
Sam loathed the arbitrary taxonomy of fiddly coffee drinks and had long since learned them all out of spite.
“Sure,” he said, grinding beans for a short shot.
“Do you know what that is?” she challenged.
“Yep,” he said. “Latte with a modified espresso to milk ratio. With microfoam.”
“Nice try, Mal,” said Jude.
“What are you having,” he asked. “Penny was it?”
Sam followed Penny’s sight line to her shoes. Which, coincidentally, were exactly his shoes though smaller.
“Great taste,” he said, nodding at her feet.
Penny’s mouth made the shape of an “O,” but no sound escaped.
Dorm lotteries made for the funniest groupings. Sam’s old freshman roommate, Kirin Mehta, used to sleepwalk and sleep-pee in a corner of their living room every weekend. Sam hoped that these two girls—the mute and the sexpot—got along for Jude’s sake.
“Let me guess,” he said to Penny. “You want a bone-dry half-caff cappuccino with a caramel drizzle?”
Penny cleared her throat and nodded.
“What are the odds?” he asked her, fairly certain that it wasn’t at all what she wanted.
Sam studied Penny out of the corner of his eye. Her messy hair lent her an air of zaniness. She looked like a scribbled-in-graphite drawing.
“Actually, may I have an iced coffee?” she piped up.
“Of course you may,” he said pointedly.
“Oh, Uncle Sam?”
He swiveled to see Mallory leaning toward him, elbows hooked on the bar. Her not-insignificant boobs were hoisted to where they almost hit her chin. She lowered her sunglasses with a silver-painted talon. Clearly, too much time had elapsed since Mallory was paid attention to.
“What’s up?”
“Is it true that you bake?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Maybe someday you’ll bake something for me,” she said, suggestively tilting her head.
He tilted his head to mirror hers.
“No maybes about it, Mallory,” he said. “Eat off Jude’s plate right now and I’ll have baked that for you. Happy trails.”
“You’re funny,” she tittered, sashaying off to follow her friend.
Sam shook his head. There was no way he was going to mix it up with a freshman. Let alone a friend of Jude’s. Even he wasn’t that dumb.