Corner Pocket
Funny how memory has a way of attaching to first and last things. Roger Ringham Jr. was aware from a college psych class of certain experiments, the results of which show that given a list of items to remember, people are more likely to remember items near the beginning or ending of the list. Recency and primacy effects – the terms came to him now as he watched a leafless Midwestern forest blur by the Greyhound window – and he felt very intelligent for a moment, very educated, like a real thinker. It was a pleasant sensation, and in the faint reflection granted by the bus window, he saw his expression alter from its usual furrowed frown to a smooth bemusement. The reflection also showed the profile of the woman in the seat next to his. She was a pretty young thing. He caught himself staring at her well-formed little ear. Her straight, dark hair was back in a high pony-tail, exposing the wispy hairs at the pale nape of her neck...
Roger Jr. closed his eyes and gave his head a quick shake. She would catch him looking and think him a lecher. He cast his eyes downward and his frown returned. What had he just been thinking of? Recency and primacy... Ah yes, the last thing his uncle had said.
Uncle Dale – the eldest of Roger Jr.'s mother's three brothers – had been a constant presence in Roger Jr.'s life for nearly twenty years. Dale's wife had died around the same time as Roger Jr.'s father, a few months after, and he had worn the same black suit for months after moving from the city back into his smalltown childhood home. At that time, the Uttley matriarch had still been alive. Roger Jr.'s mother's mother. Roger remembered the old woman standing beside the staircase as Dale carried in the few boxes of possessions he'd brought with him in his compact grey foreign sedan. Had she been tall, or had Roger Jr. just been short? He remembered her posture as she sat at head of the dinner table, how her shoulders seemed never to touch the wooden chairback.
"Thanks for having me Mama," Uncle Dale had said that first night at dinner. "It's just for a while."
"We'll keep you as long as you'll let us," Roger Jr. remembered his grandmother saying. He'd wondered at the time who was doing a favor for whom.
His grandmother had a gracious way of making it seem as though people were always putting themselves out for her benefit, even when the truth of the matter was quite the reverse.
"Thank you," she'd tell Roger Jr., "for being my little taste-tester," as she fed him cookies still hot from the oven.
But there had been talk of losing the house, to do with his father's passing. So maybe it was Uncle Dale doing the favor. He'd left his job in the city for a position at one of Roger Jr's town's three banks, the newest one with the bright blue sign. The vice president of the bank had been a high school friend of Uncle Dale's. Uncle Dale called him Davey.
At work, Uncle Dale wore a blue suit. When he got home in the evening, he changed into his black suit. It was almost half a year before Roger Jr. saw him in any clothes other than those.
Roger Jr.'s mother worked too, at the IGA grocery. She'd been a cashier there as long as he could remember. Roger Jr. liked seeing her at work, so perky and brisk. He was always looking for an excuse to go down there while she was on shift. Just to buy a pack of Big Red gum, often as not. Or some RC Cola for his grandmother. My liquid candy, she called it.
In the months that followed Uncle Dale's arrival, there was no more hand-wringing about the house, and Roger Jr.'s mother put on a more cheerful face for her brother's sake. More like her work-self.
"Davey's really riding me, Linda" Uncle Dale would say, and Roger Jr.'s mother would laugh and shush him.
It was good to hear her laugh again.
