the family

His mother’s family seemed normal to him, when he was a child. Or perhaps it was all he knew. Both of his uncles drank, good-naturedly, it seemed, and his grandfather, while quintessentially German in the worst ways, had redeeming qualities that, at one time, seemed almost honorable. Later, he’d learn that his one uncle was a philanderer as well as a drunk, and almost unabashedly so, and that his other uncle hit his wife, who one day ended up dead at the bottom of the stairs. The older he grew, the more he suspected that his grandfather sexually abused his mother. He knows families keep secrets, some of the most deep and of the darkest kind. And none of the secrets he supposes, here, have ever been mentioned aloud, or even hinted at, at any family gathering, even though all the suspects are long dead and gone and whiskey and wine often flow freely. He lives far away, now, but still, he wonders, every now and then, about them and the clan, as it is, and when he does he always remembers, first, that the uncle who hit his aunt always played Santa Claus at Christmas, and in the most jolly of fashions. Odd, that, he thinks. Or maybe not.