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I said, pulling the last heavy bag out of the trunk.
    “Then I am too,” Jannie said, and she followed me through the screen door onto the porch. “Dad?”
    “Yeah?” I said, stopping to look back at her.
    “I’m sorry for being such a bitch on the ride down,” she said.
    “You weren’t a bitch. Just a little testy.”
    She laughed. “You’re kind.”
    “I try,” I said.
    “What’s it like? You know, coming back here after so long?”
    I set the suitcase down and looked through the porch screen at the fireflies and the lit windows of my aunts’ homes, and I sniffed at some sweet smell in the air.
    “In some ways it seems remarkably unchanged, as if I left yesterday,” I said. “And in others, it’s like there’s a whole other life here now, and my memories don’t apply at all, like they happened to someone else.”

CHAPTER 9
     
    DESPITE THE DRONE of the ceiling fan over our bed, I stirred every hour or so as trains rumbled through Starksville. Shortly after dawn, I woke for good to the sound of blue jays scolding in the pine trees behind the bungalow.
    Lying there by Bree, listening to those shrill calls, I flashed hard on myself when I was very young, no more than four or five. I’d been lying in bed, blankets over my head but awake, while my brothers were sleeping. I remembered the window had been open, and there were birds chattering. I also remembered being scared by the birds, as if their calling was what had made me want to hide beneath those covers.
    That sense lingered with me even after Bree rolled over, threw her arm across my chest, and groaned. “Time is it?”
    “Almost seven.”
    “We’ve got to get earplugs.”
    “That’s high on my list too. Still disappointed not to be in Jamaica?”
    “A whole lot,” she said, her eyes still closed. “But I like your aunts, and I like you more than a whole lot. And I think it’ll do Jannie and Ali some good to be in a small town for a while.”
    “Damon gets some of that at his school,” I said.
    She nodded. “I can see that.”
    My older boy, Damon, had taken a job as a junior counselor at an annual summer basketball camp at Kraft, the prep school in the Berkshires he attends. That same camp had led him to the school and gotten him a scholarship. Damon giving back to the program had been ample reason for him to miss this trip, but I hoped he was going to come down for a weekend visit at least.
    “Shower time,” I said, throwing back the sheets.
    “Hold on there, buster,” Bree said.
    “Buster?”
    “I don’t know, it seemed appropriate,” she said, smiling.
    “What do you have in mind?” I said, snuggling up to her.
    “None of that,” she protested good-naturedly.
    “Busted Buster.”
    Bree tickled me, laughed. “No, I just wanted you to get a few things straight for me.”
    “Such as?”
    “Family-tree stuff. Did Nana Mama come from Starksville?”
    I nodded. “She grew up here. And the Hopes, her family, they go way back. Nana Mama’s grandmother was a slave somewhere in the area.”
    “Okay, so she met her husband here?”
    “Reggie Cross. My grandfather was in the merchant marines. They got married young and had my dad. You’d have to ask Nana, but because of all the time he spent at sea, it wasn’t a very good marriage. She divorced Reggie when mydad was seven or eight and took him up to Washington. She worked to put herself through Howard University to become a teacher, but the time required cost her with her son. When he was fifteen, he rebelled and came back down to Starksville to live with my grandfather.”
    “Reggie.”
    “Correct,” I said, looking up at the spinning ceiling fan. “I can’t imagine there was much supervision, which led to a lot of my dad’s excesses. I think it kills Nana Mama that she never had a good relationship with her son after that. When he died, I think in some ways she was looking to make things right by taking care of me and my brothers.”
    “She did a fine job,”