My uncle liked to get his nails done every week. Pristine and tidy, trim trim trim, on the regular.

His hair, too, cut every third week, same style, same barber, twenty-five minutes at 3 p.m. sharp. His left part was immaculate, as if prepared and drawn with a ruler.

My father and he used to sit across from each other, partners in the stock brokering business. Somewhere down the line, they pretty much stopped talking at all.

I never knew all the details. As best I could tell, it had little to do with business and almost everything to do with their mother.

Some mothers can do that to brothers. Their mom maybe had a case of the favorites: maybe she gave more money to one than the other. Maybe she promised one thing and delivered another. Eventually the brothers retreated into separate versions of the same story.

Their mom was known to us as Grandma Blue. She had a blue house and a blue car. She wore blue dresses and served dinner on blue-patterned china. She complained of loneliness and wore wigs of white hair - which somehow took on a tinge of blue.

My uncle moved just down the hall to his own office with his own clients and his own practice. My father liked bonds; my uncle preferred stocks. They remained civil, acknowledging each other in the hall or maybe coming and going from the men's room.

Maureen was my uncle's third wife, I think.

Or no, wait...she was his fourth.

She was a retired airline stewardess, having flown the friendly skies in the 1960s, when your figure and smile mattered more than the ability to show you how to fasten your seatbelt.

Aunt Maureen chain-smoked long slim cigarettes and cackled like she had swallowed an ashtray. She still had her big red hair and her looks; she communicated with a friendliness that mostly felt like flirting.

My uncle and Maureen visited a few times when we were kids.

They brought us gifts, but rarely any depth of affection.

They never had kids of their own and over time we saw them less and less until, really, never.

Once my uncle was throwing their mother a birthday party. There were about twenty people on the list, but no one from our family; my parents seemed resigned to that simply being the way things were - in our family at least.

So I went to visit my uncle in his new office to plead a case that my own brother and I should be invited to the party.

That whatever had happened between him and my father shouldn't belong to us; that we shouldn't be collateral damage.

My uncle pursed his lips and his welcoming smile turned grim.

"No," he said flatly, and looked off into the distance.

He offered little by way of explanation, except making it clear that there wouldn't be anything more to discuss.

I skulked back to my dad's office. Dad knew plenty about the art of selling anything to anyone, but didn't seem surprised in the least that I couldn't close this particular deal.

Years later, Maureen was gone, too. The divorce was acrimonious. She wanted half of everything, and perhaps deserved it.

She didn't care that my uncle was unwell, living alone, the cloak of age and sickness draped over him.

Throat cancer eventually sent my uncle to the hospital.

In whatever way these things happen, he called for my father.

At his bedside, my uncle told my father that he wished things had been different, that they should have remained closer, that whatever came between them decades ago was now water under the bridge.

My uncle had weeks to live.

My father seemed deflated.

"I'm not sure what he wanted me to do," my father offered when I asked whether they reconciled.

He shrugged. "So far as I know, you can't take the bridge or the water into the afterlife."