"Last summer, in late July, I received a phone call from my father notifying me of the death of my uncle Teddy, and asking me to come to San Francisco to help him sort through his brother’s belongings before the movers came.
My uncle had no children. He had never married, and his girlfriend of many years had gone her own way for reasons—I would later learn—related to the story that will come. He was a quiet figure, my father’s only brother, and overshadowed by my mother’s sprawling clan of six siblings. Indeed, when I first heard of Teddy’s death, I couldn’t remember when I’d last seen him. By then, our weekend family trips to San Francisco were very much a thing of the past. Even to this day, I can’t recall the surname of that girlfriend, an apricot-hued woman who chain-smoked his Camels and who, in contrast to my Aunt Deborah, my Aunt Judith, my Uncle Michael, etc., we all knew just as Donna. Nor did I remember any discussion of why they hadn’t married, or why they had no kids. For me, it was just one of Teddy’s particularities, like the Technicolor fuchsia of the borscht he drank each morning, or the elastic suspenders he wore over his off-white dress shirts, or the background drone of professional wrestling on his bedroom television, which seemed to cycle on some eternal loop."
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