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One Ray means nothing without the other.
    Uncle Ray: my father’s brother—three years his senior. Also a cop. Or was a cop. He joined the force when he was twenty-one, made homicide inspector by twenty-eight. His moral compass was highly evolved, as were his dietary standards.
    He ran five miles a day and drank green tea before anyone ever told you to drink green tea. He ate leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables and read Prevention magazine the way Russian lit professors read Dostoyevsky. He drank exactly one whiskey and soda at weddings and wakes. No more.
    Uncle Ray met Sophie Lee when he was forty-seven, and while he had always been a serial monogamist, this was the first time he really fell in love. Sophie taught elementary school and happened to be the only witness to a vehicular homicide Ray was investigating.
    Six months later they were married in a banquet hall overlooking San Francisco Bay. I have little recollection of the night. What I can say for sure is that, at twelve years old, I drank more at Uncle Ray’s wedding than he did.
    From all I could tell, Uncle Ray and Sophie were happy. Then shortly after their first anniversary, Uncle Ray, a man who never smoked a cigarette in his life, got cancer. Lung cancer.
    Within a month, Uncle Ray went into the hospital, had part of his lung removed, and endured a grueling stint of chemotherapy. He lost all of his hair and twenty pounds. The cancer metastasized. Uncle Ray began another spate of chemo.
    The whispers in our house during that time were deafening. There was a constant hum of words, short phrases, and occasionally muffled arguments all unintended for our ears. But David and I are highly trained eavesdroppers. “Surveillance starts at home” we used to say. Over the years we discovered “soft spots” in the house, specific locations where the household acoustics allow you to listen in on conversations in an entirely separate location. David’s and my intelligence gathering resulted in yet another list.
Uncle Ray’s chemo wasn’t working
Sophie stopped visiting him in the hospital
Mom was pregnant
    The pregnancy was an accident, David and I concluded upon comparing notes. After thirteen years of raising me, I was sure my parents were ready to call it a day. But new life is the only thing that softens death. And when it became clear that Uncle Ray was going to die, it was then, I suspect, that my mother decided to have the baby. It was a girl and they named her Rae, after the man who would soon be dead. But then Uncle Ray didn’t die.
    No one could explain it. The doctors said he was within weeks from the end. It was as obvious on his medical chart as it was on his body. This was a dying man. And then he just got better. When the dark circles around his eyes faded and the flesh seemed to return to his cheeks, we still said good-bye. Three months later, after his appetite returned and he gained back thirty of the forty pounds that he lost during the vicious chemotherapy treatments, we still said good-bye. Six months later, when the doctor told Sophie that her husband was going to live, it was Sophie who said good-bye. She left him with no explanation. That is when the new Uncle Ray was born.
    He started drinking, really drinking—more than one whiskey and soda at weddings and wakes. For the first time in my life, Ray could hold his liquor better than me. He started gambling, not friendly poker matches among friends, but high-stakes games with minimum bets of five hundred dollars in secret locations delivered through codes on a pager. The racetrack became his second home. The ponies were his new love. The only time I ever saw Uncle Ray run again was during halftime of a 49ers game when he ran out of snacks. His health food days were over. Mostly he ate cheese and crackers and drank piss beer by the case. He was no longer a one-woman kind of man. Uncle Ray would play the field for the rest of his life.
    It could be argued that the new Uncle Ray was more