Distanced Relative

I remember being barely big enough to see over the kitchen counter at that time. My parents said that the man standing next to it was a cousin. I had asked whose cousin he was, and both had mumbled something that I didn’t understand, but what I understood was: he was there. I could barely see the box of cookies on the counter that my mom had got at the corner store and could barely sneak one as they tried to gather as much information from this stranger that they could using their limited skills in his sing-song language that didn’t match ours. 

As my hand retracted from the plate and I put the cookies close to my chest for safe keeping, I made eye contact with him, and he smiled a reassuring turn of his lips that showed my theft was our secret. I quietly left the kitchen and went to the living room to play. My brother was away at school for the day, so it was just my parents and our cousin at home for two hours. When my brother returned, he had many questions for me that I couldn’t answer. I still couldn’t answer whose cousin it was, but by this time it didn’t matter because I was out of a bed for the night and my brother still possessed his top bunk. I thought that since our cousin was older, he could handle the top bunk, but I guess the bottom was for me, grandma when she visited and our current visitor.

During dinner I tried for the first half to not make eye contact, but as soon as he said that he worked for a company that created video games and he was taking a break to creatively recharge I couldn’t break eye contact. I asked him about my favourite game with the little character that had to make his way through all of the different worlds like the medieval land with dragons and knights and the outer space one with the Martians and cool spaceship. He said that it had made money but wasn’t what he had in mind. When I asked what he had in mind for the next one he said that he hadn’t come up with anything yet and that was why he was taking a break. This didn’t really sound great to me and reminded me of when my mom told me to get my head out of the clouds and come back to the real world. I guess he liked the same worlds that I had in my head.

After my brother and I had asked him a few too many questions and my mother had served the baked pears, which weren’t my favourite, but my cousin devoured, I noticed he got quiet. He didn’t really answer fully where he lived, only that he was visiting various friends and trying to get his creativity back. He helped my mom clean up and they talked about when they were younger, not the same stories as my mom talked about with my aunt, but more like what we saw in her magazines when they did 20-year anniversary issues that reminded her of when she was a teenager.

Our cousin took far longer than our grandma getting ready for bed and my dad had to tell me to stop being antsy while I waited to have my bath. My brother told me later he seemed like he prayed for an hour before he shut up and sounded like he was spitting when he breathed out ten times before the got quiet again. When he finally fell asleep my brother finally gave up on feeling like the boogieman was asleep under him and drifted off. 

I wasn’t so lucky. In our living room, on our couch that wasn’t quite fully stuffed anymore, I saw the lights from the passing cars drift from the one corner of the room to the other. The swooshing, buzz of the traffic was calming, but my neighbour’s TV was not. He liked to watch a rerun of a gameshow with a dinging sound for the right answer and buzzed when someone gave the wrong one. I couldn’t tune it out so I stared at the ceiling wanting to say all of the words my mom said never to repeat. I think I went to sleep long after my actual bedtime was and woke up when my mom woke at the same time as the sun.

I shuffled to the kitchen and ignored the “how’d you sleep” question.  I didn’t think she cared and neither did our cousin. I noticed he brought his bags out so I was happy that he’d be gone today. I hadn’t really got to know him and didn’t care to.

When my dad took him to the train station, I went for the ride and nosed around looking at a news stand and eyeballed the candy. The one good thing about going along was that my cousin picked up on what I was staring at and bought me a large chocolate bar and my dad had to be polite and allow it. I ate my chocolate bar in peace on the way home and didn’t give much thought to our cousin after that.

A few months later, a package arrived with a thank you to my brother and I that was tacked to the latest game. It said that we’d inspired his creativity and I had no idea how, but I popped the game into the console and played it until I mastered it. We got various gifts from him in the coming years: more chocolate, games, pictures of him in various places with friends and other cousins and finally got drawings that looked a lot like us. It wasn’t until after I’d graduated high school and I found one of those pictures and asked my mom. She laughed and said that they’d been talking to him in the grocery store and found out that they’d had the same great uncle and that it happened that he’d been looking for a place to stay while he was passing through town. It wasn’t that direct of a relation, but for some reason my father and mother had decided to take a chance and ended up having a pretty good relationship with him with correspondence and telephone calls. For all the times they’d taught me not to talk to strangers, they’d kept their own indiscretion on that topic top secret.