Then Frank came. Jim and Sam had never met their mother's brother, and she never seemed willing to talk much about him. Something about the glint in her eye when she looked at him made Jim wonder if Winona wished her brother was the corpse.

Sam decided immediately that he and Frank were a lost cause. Jim tried very much to like his new uncle – he'd never really had an adult other than his mother to look up to (teachers were too soft and frankly too stupid) – but he was a difficult man to love.

That's what his mother said: "Now boys, your uncle, he can be…difficult. Just trust me, this is for the best." Sam had scoffed and stamped to his room, but Jim had just gazed at his mother. Instinct, he thought. Looking at the stars and calling Frank are just two sides of the same coin. He'd read that metaphor in a book, and thought it sounded nice, even though he'd never seen physical currency. Credit wasn't multifaceted. But Frank was, so Jim tried very hard to see his better sides.

By the time he was eight, however, Jim had decided there really weren't better sides to Frank. Sam had all but moved in with his best friend, so Jim stayed home to deal with the shards of his mother as Frank broke yet another bottle of beer in frustration. "Damn it, Winona, you shouldn'ta had kids by that idiot. They'll grow up to be dumb Federation fucks just like him, and then die in space, and then where will you be? Because I sure as hell won't be taking care of you in our old age."

Sometimes his mother would shake off the dead starry emptiness in her gaze and mutter, "At least he believed in something." But that would make Frank rage all the more, and Jim feared to look upon it.

He was never as bad with Frank as Sam (Sam, who would scream and scream at their uncle for how he was stifling them, ruining them), but he'd found subtle ways to express his own dislike. Or is it hatred, he mused when he was nine, because I am burning. So he'd poke holes in the beer cans (bottles got to be too expensive) and hide Frank's shoes and kick dust on that stupid beautiful car. And for about a year, provided he didn't look his mother in the eye, that sufficed.