This year he brought a suitcase full of salt with him—just add water, he said, and you’ve got an ocean. It was the same suitcase that he’d brought to Christmas dinner every year, always filled with something new—tiny cymbals, crepe paper, colored pencils. One year, he brought trick balloons and made constellations out of them. I let Marina have the Big Dipper, while I took the Little. Humor her, my mother had told me. She’d popped her Big Dipper by then, and ended up with my Little, hugging it as she fell asleep on the sofa, all the deformed, neon constellations lying beside her in the dark. After Uncle Al went to bed in Marina’s room, Ma let me drink coffee at the table with the aunts, who talked, as they did every year, about how Uncle Al needed a woman.
When he first opened the salt suitcase for us, I was skeptical. I’m too old, I wanted to tell him. Didn’t he know? We watched the little grains of salt pour out, then trickle, then drop as he jostled the last ones free, down to a sparkling white pile at our feet. What are you waiting for? he asked. Go get some water. So I headed to the kitchen and returned with a copper pot filled with tap water. Go ahead, Uncle Al said, pour it on. My sister snatched the pot from my hands. She grinned as she held it by the handle and turned it over. The water sloshed at our feet, dissolving the salt almost instantly, and then spread out across the kitchen tile. Under the breeze of the ceiling fan, the water rippled slightly and lapped at the edge of Uncle Al’s brown leather shoes. The leather was crackled, made to look like reptile skin. Light flickered in them. The trick had failed, and I was embarrassed for him—pena ajena, my mother would have said—but Marina didn’t understand. She started laughing and splashing her toes in the puddle. I put my hand on her arm and shushed her, but then Uncle Al began to giggle too. Squatting, Marina dipped a finger in the puddle and then in her mouth. “It tastes like the sea!”
The year of the constellations, Uncle Al stayed for lunch on the day after Christmas. At the table, I asked him why he had no children, and my mother pinched me so hard that it left a plum bud of skin on my arm. I watched the color drain from it for weeks, imagining names for all of Uncle’s would-be children—Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Delphinus, Hydra.