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move quickly or else the birds will get them. Would you like some pie, Brother Jones?”
    “No, thanks.”
    Serena cut a large piece of the cobbler and set it down in front of me. I took a bite and it was crazy good; the filling was bubbling and syrupy and almost too hot.
    “Would you like coffee, Jones? More lemonade?”
    “Do you have anything harder than lemonade?” he asked darkly.
    Serena laughed, opened the lower door of a cabinet, and produced a bottle of brown liquid with a white label. She placed it on the table in front of him, her hand gripping the neck firmly.
    “Is this hard enough for you, Brother Jones?”
    I snickered at the innuendo. He took the bottle and examined the label; it was Jim Beam.
    “It’ll do, Sister Serena. It’ll do.”
    Serena took two glasses from the cupboard, and my father poured brown liquid into them while I ate my cobbler and tried not to be noticed. For a moment, Serena and my father sat across from each other,sipping their shots of whiskey and not speaking, and I realized there was a whole world they shared that I had no idea about. None at all.
    “I don’t like you staring at me,” my father said.
    “I’m relearning you,” Serena replied. “I’ve realized the memories, the images we keep in our heads, aren’t really images at all. They’re much more vague. When I think of you, I don’t think of your face, I think of your shape. You’re faceless in my memory. You move through my memories and I know it’s you, but what I picture is without detail.”
    He shrugged in response.
    “If I were a painter,” Serena continued, “I would paint people without faces. Or with eyebrows only. Eyebrows and hair and chins. Because that’s what we remember. The points. But now that I see you again, I can fill in those details.”
    “That’s an elaborate metaphor,” my father said. “Trevor, you should write that down. Clearly, your aunt is the writer you aspire to be.”
    “Woe be the family of a writer,” Serena said. “They will forever bleed in his stories. Isn’t that right, Brother Jones?”
    “Why do you call him Brother Jones?” I asked.
    “It’s an artifact from our childhood,” Serena said with a chuckle. “It’s something we call each other.”
    “Why?”
    “Why?” she echoed wistfully. “Why does the cock crow? Don’t ask him; he doesn’t know.”
    Silence again, then Serena said, “I will return for you.”
    My father didn’t acknowledge the comment, so I felt I had to. “What does that mean?” I asked.
    “It’s what your father said when he left. I was eleven years old. Mother had died and Jones was going away. He hugged me tightly in his big, strong, holding arms, and he said: ‘I will return for you, Sister Serena. I will return.’ It was poetic; ripped from the pages of a novel. Maybe your memoir, Young Trevor. I will return for you, Sister Serena. I’ve been waiting, and he hasn’t returned. Until now.”
    “Life is complicated,” my father said after an uncomfortable pause.
    “So I’ve heard,” she said. “And yet some things are not so complex as they initially seem. The fate of this house, for instance.”
    Again, my father was silent, but he was thinking about something; I could tell.
    “What about the fate of this house?” I asked.
    “It is both simple and complex at the same time,” Serena said. “The goal, of course, is to achieve simplicity; the method may be circuitous.”
    “Maybe we should table this conversation for the moment,” my father said. “I’m not sure Trevor is interested.”
    “He should be,” Serena said. “Trevor, are you interested in your family’s legacy? Or would you prefer to turn a deaf ear and leave your fate in the hands of those who may or may not have your best interest in mind?”
    “I’m interested,” I said.
    “You see?” Serena said to my father. “And, anyway, I believe in full disclosure. He’s one of the family. I don’t think secrets should be kept from children