When I drop my suitcases in Dad’s living room, I find him waiting in his kitchenette, car keys in hand. I’d like a minute to sit down, maybe nap. My cross-country flight began at four AM. Dad hurries me out the door, insisting there’s errands to run, it won’t take long, there’ll be time for napping after.
In the car, Dad tells me he needs to drop off some things at Uncle Penny’s, insists that we’ll be quick and it won’t kill me to say hello.
He asks me if I called him, meaning Penny.
I say, “No.” Of course not.
Dad nods. He’d expect nothing else, turns sharp onto Mulholland Drive, and rolls the top down on the Corvette. I get queasy. By the time I build the nerve to ask to pull over, or maybe turn back, we’re there. It’s a big, white place with columns. As a kid, I thought it was a mansion, but it’s a tacky shithole. It gave me places to hide. There’s a pool in back, though Penny doesn’t swim, kept it empty, only filled it a few weeks a year for bigshot guests, saving the upkeep money otherwise.
Dad hops out, me trailing, takes nothing in with him.
“What are we dropping off?” I say.
“Just checking up,” he calls back, like I said something stupid.
There’s no butler anymore, of course. We let ourselves in. The place smells like mold and dust. All the lights are off.
“Penny?” Dad says, eerie in the big dark.
I hope Penny’s gone somewhere, maybe hauled off by my aunt, who technically owns the house, as I understand it. Grandpa’s will was a mess.
She got this house and Dad got Penny.
A mess.
“Back here,” comes my uncle’s squeaky voice from the downstairs game room, where I’m sure we’ll find him sitting at the bar and I’m right.
Everywhere in the house there’s framed posters hanging, most of them the exact same—Penny only made three movies—each of Penny sitting on my Grandpa’s lap. Those movies made half of Grandpa’s money, and Uncle Penny the favorite son.
Penny’s slumped on a stool with a bottle of whiskey. He raises a thin, creaky arm to wave.
Dad starts tidying up.
“You don’t need to do that,” Penny says. “Have a drink.”
From across the room, I can see the wood of his face had gone soft with drinking, spongey. No one’s bothered to change his body in probably years; he's stained and dusty, too.
“How’re you going, Dan,” Penny says to Dad. His voice, although high, is different without Grandpa, even spookier. I associate it with black and white TV, which bored the shit out of me as a kid; Dad would sit me down and play the movies, the Tonight Show spots with Jack Paar. “That’s your Uncle and your Grandpa. They were stars.”
Dad admired Grandpa, loved the short-lived screen-writing jobs—the nepotism—and hated Penny.
“I helped them pick the bomb,” Penny says to his shot glass. He’s about to launch into meeting Truman, his favorite story, the one he tells over and over. Dad cuts him off with “Did you fire Amy?”
Amy’s my cousin. She worked here cleaning up, last I heard; no one stays with Penny long.
“She stole my Oscar,” Penny says, “and sold it. For pills.”
Grandpa won this honorary Oscar, which my aunt swooped in and scooped up when he died. Like most everything else.
Dad sits with Penny. “We need to take you to the shop. You’re getting splinters.”
Penny just sits there on the stool like it’s a knee. He says, “They asked me where to drop the bomb. They had this big map—no, a globe, and I go right… here.” He thumps a flat, square hand down on the bar.
Dad’s up and gone. He comes back with a rectangular case, like a guitar case.
“Mike,” he says to me, “let’s put Penny in his box. He needs to go to the shop. He’s getting splinters.”
Penny starts to speak, but Dad lifts my puppet uncle’s head and looks closer. “This jaw’s ruined. We’ll get it replaced.”
Uncle Penny’s telling more of his bullshit Truman story when we dump him in the velvet-lined box, shut the lid, and snap the latches.
In the car, I ask Dad if we’re going to go to the shop now, or if we can maybe do it later? He says there is no shop, he’s talked to a museum. My aunt’s tending to the rest.
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