Bug Hollow

by Michelle Huneven

The summer when Sally Samuelson was eight, her brother Ellis graduated from high school and a few days later, he and his best friends, Heck Stevens and Ben Klosterman, drove up the coast in Heck’s ’64 Rambler American.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” Sally’s father said. “It’s high time he gave us something to worry about.”

“We’ve given Saudi enough of our lives,” she said. “I don’t want François growing up in this ersatz suburbia stuffed with bigots and surrounded by razor wire.”

“Wow.” Katie was being polite. She disliked musicals. Whenever actors burst into song, she was embarrassed for them.

When Katie had called her to say she’d be home for a few days because Sib was dying, Mrs. Tyler, in her typical gentle way, suggested Katie think of what she might say to Sib while she still had the chance. “You two have a complicated relationship,” she said, “but maybe come up with a few good memories, some things that you’re grateful for.”

“You’ll see. The second I’m incinerated there’ll be a line out the door of women bearing casseroles.”

“Your all being here is wonderful support for her, and for each other, I’m sure,” he said. “Yours is the kind of loving family that I don’t see often enough.” They nodded like bobblehead dash ornaments. Apparently, Katie thought, going through the motions looked like love.

For Eva, explaining her family to people had always been complicated, what with the two sets of parents, the smudged generations—grandparents who were parents, aunts who were sisters—plus who was dead, who was alive. After she heard a song by Willie Nelson called “I’m My Own Grandpa,” Eva wrote a song called “I’m My Own Aunt”: My grandma and my grandpa Took me as their kid So my dad and their two daughters All became my sibs Since my dad was now my brother His daughter’d be my niece, So as my father’s sister, I’m an aunt to me! Chorus: It seems impossible, People say I can’t But I’m my own aunt I’m my own aunt!

“I guess.” The ocean, at least, was reassuringly eternal. “But I was thinking I’d take him with me.” “Take him where?” “Ellis never got to go to college, so I thought he could come with me. Wherever I end up. For a while, at least. Then maybe we can go to your beach.”

Bringing her dead father's ashes with her to college

“Just because I love a married man doesn’t mean I have a thing for them.” In fact, now that she knew the powerlessness of loving someone married, she would never, not ever, put herself in that position again. As for the building inspector, she would never be someone’s latest auxiliary interest, ranked somewhere between Trollope and mountain-manhood. Nobody would ever call her a heckuva lot of fun.

“As you know, Sally, I’m working on it.” He sat on the bed to pull on his jeans. “But it’ll kill her,” he said. “I want to leave, yes. I just need more time to figure out how.” “It’s been five months.” He stood and hitched his jeans and glowered down at her. “Well, I can’t do it today, what with all my kids home for the party.”

“Oh, JP, nobody would ever say you weren’t Claude’s son,” Pilar said when he tried to explain this disenfranchisement, his caving sense of loss. “He raised you, that’s a fact. Never mind one long-ago sperm.” Yet it was a blow, he insisted, to contain no Claude.

Learned at almost 34 that my dad wasn’t my real dad and my mom has lied to me all my life. My brother is now my half brother, and I have half sisters and a half niece I never knew existed—and a bio dad, who’s maybe living, maybe not.

“That was the only time your father and I were not completely happy together.” JP could think of a few other times. Their marriage had had its weather.

“I was desperate for adult company. Phil was easy to talk to. And kind. We drank too much; everyone did in that terrible place. And Phil was good-natured. I mean, he was nobody special, just a company engineer, but very modest and sweet and low-key—not at all like your father.” “Except he is my father, Mom. Phil is my father.” “No. You know what I mean.”

A few times, I thought of saying something to you, but what did I have to go on? A three-second laugh? I suppose I might have asked Phil to take a paternity test. But why? To drop a bomb on two families? And anyway, JP, Claude was your father. He raised you. He supported you. He worshipped your intelligence. You couldn’t have had a more loving, loyal, devoted father.”

Met bio dad and I found it hard to think and talk because I kept wondering what it meant, what I was supposed to feel. Mostly I felt nothing. Twice, I almost cried. At 34 yo met bio dad for the first time. He was warm and respectful and could not have been kinder. It was A LOT.

“We figured out when Phil knew your mom,” said Sally. “It was his last trip to Saudi, a few months before our brother died. That’s what’s so mind-blowing: Who knew when we lost Ellis, there were already two new kids in the works? Eva and you.” JP struggled to make sense of it. A half brother who died—and now two (or was it three?) half sisters, not to mention a half niece? Too many halves! His whole family had been halved. Halved and multiplied.

“My old parts dried up long ago,” she said. “I don’t care about sex. But who knew, in my old age, love would come again?”