My brain refuses to accept what my eyes are telling me: my parents on the bare wooden floor, my mother’s hair thin and gray, my father’s hands cracked like old timber, and a little girl curled between them like the last bit of warmth in a dying fireplace.
Then I hear the footsteps.
Slow. Heavy. Familiar.
A shadow shifts in the back room, and a man steps into the dim light like he owns the place.
It isn’t a stranger.
It’s Travis, my cousin. The same cousin who used to clap me on the shoulder at family cookouts and say, “Don’t forget us when you make it big.” The same cousin I trusted to “help” my parents whenever there was a banking problem, to “handle things” back home in rural Tennessee when I was too far away in Chicago to do it myself.
He’s wearing my father’s old denim jacket like it belongs to him.
And the way he looks at me isn’t surprise.
It’s annoyance… like I showed up too early to a party I was never invited to.
“Well,” Travis says, rubbing sleep from his eyes with lazy fingers. “Look who finally remembered where he came from.”
My father stiffens beside my mother.
The little girl clutches my mother tighter, her eyes darting like she already knows men like Travis.