Mom used to rush out, and Uncle Jerry would come to watch him.
Sometimes Jerry would show up mad, or sweaty, or both, but Lyle knew that Jerry loved him.
Sometimes he would be alone until Jerry got there because mom couldn’t wait.
On those times, Jerry would scoop Lyle up and wrestle him and make popcorn and teach him to play guitar and cuss out his mom behind her back and take him for ice cream and tell him the hidden treasure story and let Lyle fall asleep on the couch with his head in Jerry’s lap.
It was emphysema that took Mom, not dope. Lyle cried a little, but Jerry didn’t, just put his arm around Lyle and told Lyle his Mom was in a better place.
Lyle by that time was twenty-two, not certain about an afterlife or how much longer he could stand snaking drains.
Jerry was up to two packs a day, and Lyle knew that one day he’d be standing in front of Jerry’s casket alone.
Two weeks later some kitchen remodel sales rep on her phone t-boned Jerry on his Triumph Bonneville and Jerry and his two pack a day habit didn’t make it off the pavement.
Lyle got Jerry’s guitars and his bungalow near the airport and fourteen framed posters of bands Lyle couldn’t stand.
He kept the posters anyway, because he loved Uncle Jerry, and sold all the furniture before he moved in.
As he was cleaning Jerry’s papers out of an old particle board desk some idiot on Marketplace gave him twenty bucks for, Lyle found four well used Dunlop mediums and an old piece of paper, dusty but neatly folded. There were thin lines and thick lines, curves and right angles, and the only word on it, next to a crudely drawn rectangle, was “treasure.”
***
Photo by Drew Patrick Miller on Unsplash
Beautiful