Mom and Dad started going out camping together. Both came back happy. Both gave me attention that made me happy. It was exciting. Neither of them were fighting any more. The bad old days had disappeared with the visit by the scary man. I got things. Toys. Clothes. Not just new clothes, but new clothes so stiff they itched me. They had funny tags on them. The food was sweeter, and more of everything.

Mom and Dad would go out camping a lot over the next year, according to Uncle Soap. He would take care of me while they were away on the weekends. Uncle Soap was a short, round man with white wisps of hair making him look like the character from the back to the future cartoons, only not quite as tall or skinny. He was always talking to himself. All day long he would mutter about rain, about warming, about trash overload, and people overload. I think he was a researcher of some kind.

His apartment was more cluttered than mom and dad’s, only, it was paper. Paper was everywhere. News papers stacked nearest the door. Sometimes they would be a whole stack, other days almost nothing. In the small living room, there were so many stacks of paper that it was a maze. Uncle Soap had paths to the TV, to the kitchen, to his old yellow sofa he slept on, to the bathroom, to the faded blue easy chair with a brown stain where I threw up when I was sick once, and to a locked door at the very back of the house that he never opened while I was there with him.

Uncle Soap was a good man. I liked going to see him. He was never cross or angry at me, and he never hit me about anything. He answered any questions I had about anything. He always watched out for me. The attention was so much that it was smothering on some days. I’d go hide near the faded blue easy chair in a small square of empty space just behind it, and look at the papers, imagining tall white buildings that things went on in like a person making a stamp like mom did, and stamping out comics.