My uncle’s kitchen in Las Vegas holds four people and about six conversations. My aunt is telling me something about my father. My uncle interrupts to correct the year it happened. She keeps going without acknowledging him. Someone sets a plate of cut fruit in front of me that I didn’t ask for and don’t need, and I eat all of it.
This is the closest I get to my parents now.
Not because I don’t see these people. I always have. But nobody visits the way they used to. People call instead, or they mean to. A house full of everyone at once, for no reason except that it’s Tuesday, is something my parents’ generation did and mine mostly doesn’t.
Here is the arithmetic that brought me here. My father is gone. So is one of his brothers, and so is his sister Halima. On my mother’s side there is no one left at all, my mother included. What remains of my father’s generation is one sister and three brothers.
So I booked the trip. Not a stop on the way to somewhere else, not a weekend that happened to work out. I asked for the days and I came. Next week we drive to California to see my aunt and my cousins, their wives, their children, all of it.
My cousin lives here too, with his parents. He’s here every day, part of the noise. I didn’t know how much I’d been missing that until I was sitting in it.
They are feeding me constantly. They ask what I need before I’ve worked out that I need it. There’s no version of me here that has to be competent or interesting.
And they tell the stories I already know.
I heard every one of them from my mother and father, most more than once, a few so often I could tell them myself. But these are those stories from inside a different body. My aunt was in the room when it happened. Her version carries a detail my father always left out. Or it loses one he always included. Or the blame lands on someone else entirely, and nobody at this table finds that worth arguing about. They just keep going. I’m listening to a story I’ve heard forty times because this is the forty-first, and there won’t be an unlimited supply.
I understand now that I was never hearing the story. I was hearing my father’s telling of it, which is a different object, and there were only ever a few people alive who had their own.
My parents never sat me down and explained that this was the point. They just lived as though it were. My father was a diplomat, which meant he and my mother and their children were safe when the war came. The rest of the family wasn’t. They went from prominent and comfortable to refugees, and they landed where they could land, Germany, and several different states here. We watched all of it happen. My parents treated the scattering as a logistics problem rather than an ending. Our house was the hub. People came from wherever they’d ended up and stayed for weeks. Every bedroom taken, then mattresses on the living room floor, then the hallway, then the kitchen. You stepped over people to get to the bathroom. Nobody delivered a lesson about family and I absorbed the whole thing anyway, the way you absorb a language before you know it has grammar.
I’m in the third chapter of my life now. What that mostly means is that I’ve stopped assuming I’ll get around to things.
Four people left who remember my father as a boy. That number has only ever moved one direction.
I’m not going to be the generation this stops with. That’s the whole of my ambition here. What happens after me isn’t mine to decide, and I’ve made my peace with that, but whether there’s anything left to carry is decided now, by whether I keep showing up while everyone is still in the room.
Sitting in that house I feel overwhelmed and completely safe at the same time, which I didn’t know were compatible.
Sophia is twenty. She’s seen some of this, the full houses, the fuss, the cooking for more than showed up. I don’t know if it took. Nobody finds that out for years.
Tell me about the house you grew up in. Was it the hub, or was it quiet? I want to know.
