It was inappropriate to make out at a wake, even if we were technically outside the wake in a damp gazebo, so we had a long hug instead. And I was honestly a bit embarrassed to be a long-hug-having person, but sometimes you just had to long-hug.

We were at about the eighty percent mark on the long hug when to my dismay, I saw Uncle Jim making his way towards us across the garden.

“Really gave the old man what for, eh?” he yell-said from the steps.

Oliver and I dehugged and sort of stared at him. It wasn’t so much the intrusion as the shock of somebody admitting that the Inappropriate Eulogy of Doom had actually happened. As ever, Oliver pulled himself together faster than I did. “I’m sorry, Uncle Jim. I know he was your brother and…I’m sorry.”

Uncle Jim shrugged. “Probably a bloody silly thing to do, all told.”

“Yes,” agreed Oliver moodily.

“Still,” continued Uncle Jim. “You were right. He had it coming.”

That wasn’t what I’d expected, and Oliver seemed to be languishing in a similar state of flummoxosity.

Ascending into the gazebo, Uncle Jim pulled up an iron garden chair and sat down opposite us. “Be honest with you,” he said, “I wish I’d had the balls to tell him to go fuck himself too. And your granddad, for that matter.”

“I wouldn’t call it balls,” Oliver replied. Given the audience, he didn’t add that he thought it was inappropriately cis-and-gender-normative to associate one particular set of gonads with emotional strength, but he was clearly thinking it quite loudly. “I’d got to the point where I felt it was… Well, I suppose I explained my reasoning fairly extensively already.”

Uncle Jim nodded. “You did. You did. There comes a point, doesn’t there? One where you’ve got to make a choice. Stand up for yourself, or spend your whole life getting walked over.” Out of nowhere he heaved a sigh so heavy I thought it was going to shake the roof off our little shelter and leave us all to run back inside or get drizzled on. “Suppose looking back, I think I made the wrong one.”

“I always thought you two got on?” The tone in Oliver’s voice was careful, like he was sneaking up on a butterfly and didn’t want to spook it.

“Oh, we did. Best friends our whole lives. I mean, he was my big brother. How could I not think he was the business?”

“You could have met him?” I suggested before I could stop myself.

Uncle Jim laughed. “I like you, Luc. In fact, thinking about it, I suppose all this telling people to go fuck themselves was you from the start, wasn’t it?”

There really didn’t seem to be a good way to answer that. “I’m not sure I’d put it quite—”