After I paid $77,000 for my brother’s wedding, he sent me to the wrong city in Italy “as a joke.” I landed in Naples while they were celebrating in Florence. The next morning, he texted: “LOL, I just didn’t want you there.” My mother added, “This is your fault.” I didn’t argue. I smiled… and sent her a gift—four feet tall, delivered by courier. She called me in tears: “Can I please pay you back?”

My uncle Warren sounded exactly like my father if my father had smoked for thirty years and stopped apologizing.

“Alyssa,” he said when I picked up. “You got a minute?”

I sat down on the floor by my couch because something in his voice made standing feel too temporary. Outside, traffic moved in wet ribbons under the streetlights. My apartment smelled like rain coming through the cracked window and the lemon cleaner I’d used that morning because I suddenly couldn’t tolerate dust.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got a minute.”

Warren exhaled into the line. I heard the squeak of what was probably his old leather recliner. He lived in Pennsylvania in a house with a woodshop out back and always smelled faintly, permanently, like sawdust and coffee.

“Your father would’ve lost his mind over this,” he said.

The sentence hit me low and hard.

I had spent so much of the week in battle mode that I hadn’t let my father into it. Not really. And hearing Warren say his name out loud, just like that, pulled a thread I hadn’t touched in years.

“I know,” I said.

“No,” Warren replied. “I mean he would’ve driven to Connecticut himself and ripped that boy’s front door off.”