“She’s not much older than you are,” Gerald confided to Travis, “so it’s best you not call her Aunt Deeny.”

The interior was roomier than might have been expected for a mobile home. It reeked of cigarette smoke, but was clean and neat. The furnishings looked as if they had been purchased in the ‘70s, although the mobile home itself didn’t appear to be that old. Deeny gave a wave of her hand to indicate that we should have a seat. I sat on one of two avocado-green recliners; Travis, having smoothly extricated himself from Gerald’s grasp, took the other one. Gerald didn’t seem to mind taking a seat on the gold-and-brown couch, separated from us by a heavy, imitation walnut coffee table. There was a paperback on one corner, an action adventure story, with a bookmark near the last pages.

Deeny came back from the kitchen with four cans of Coors still in their six-pack plastic collar. She sat down close to Gerald and pulled them free, popping tops and shoving a can at each of us without asking if we wanted one.

Gerald lifted his beer can as if for a toast, and Deeny stopped in the act of taking her first swig to hold hers up as well-so Travis and I followed suit.

“Mi casa es su casa,” Gerald said, smiling at Travis.

“Speak American!” Deeny complained.

“English,” Gerald corrected.

“Whatever,” she said sullenly, earning a reproving look from Gerald. Her shoulders drooped a little and she asked, “Well, what did you say in Mexican?”

Gerald smiled at Travis and me, rolling his eyes. Her shoulders fell a little farther and he gave her a quick squeeze. “Oh, now,” he said easily, “don’t fret. It’s just an old way of welcoming someone in Spanish. Kind of like saying ‘Make yourself at home.” And that’s what I want my nephew here to do-make himself at home.“

“Thanks,” Travis said.

“I take it Arthur doesn’t know you’re here?” Gerald asked.

I nearly missed seeing the sharp look Deeny gave him; I didn’t know what to make of it, though. Travis, for his part, was remarkably self-possessed.

“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that my father has passed away,” he said.

“Arthur?” Gerald said, his eyes wide. “Arthur’s dead?”

“Yes, sir,” Travis said.

“No-no it can’t be. Why, he’s not even fifty!”

“No, sir. He was forty-eight. He died of cancer.”

“Cancer?”

“Yes, sir. Last month.”

“Arthur, dead a month… excuse me,” he said, rising.

He walked away from us, down a short hallway, where I supposed the bedrooms were. Deeny got up and followed him, not saying a word.

Travis glanced over at me. “I didn’t handle that very well, did I?”

“There’s no easy way to tell someone something like that,” I said.

“I feel terrible. I should have realized that he wouldn’t know. I should have thought about it before we came over here.”

I didn’t say anything. We waited, neither one of us sure exactly how much time had passed since the Spannings went into the other room. We could hear their muffled voices every now and again, not able to make out any words, nor trying to. Travis grew edgier as time passed.

Sitting was only making me stiffer, so I stood and stretched.

“I don’t want this beer,” I said. “You want yours?”

He shook his head. He held the nearly full can up to me.

I took it from him, and picked up my own. I carried them into the kitchen and poured them down the drain. I rinsed out the cans and looked around for a recycling bin. I found a plastic grocery sack full of empty cans next to the trash can, and bent to put them in it. As I did, something in the trash can caught my eye.

A church bulletin. From St. Anthony’s Catholic Church. I reached in and carefully extracted it from beneath a used wet coffee filter. I heard voices coming into the living room and quickly folded the paper. I had just stashed it in my back jeans pocket when I heard Deeny say, “What are you doing?”

“Just putting our beer cans in the recycling,” I said.

I stood up and washed my hands, while she leaned against the counter, scowling at me. I could hear Gerald talking to Travis in the other room, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. When I reached for a hand towel, she said, “Make yourself at home, why don’t you?”

“Mi casa es su casa,” I said with a smile, taking perverse pleasure in watching her eyes narrow.

In the living room, Travis was sitting close to Gerald on the sofa, their heads bent over something. Gerald had a pair of reading glasses on. As I drew closer, I realized they were looking through a photo album. Travis looked up at me and patted the empty space next to him. “Sit next to me, you’ll enjoy this.”

I did, then we all scooted over again to allow Deeny to sit on the other side of Gerald. She ended up draping herself over his shoulders, sitting more behind him than next to him, but he didn’t seem to mind. He reached up and took her arms in his hands, stroking his fingers along her forearms. He let Travis hold the album.

Travis turned back a few pages. “Look! Here’s a photo of my great-grandparents. The Spannings. And that was their farm.”

He pointed to a black-and-white photo of an elderly couple standing in front of a Model A. There was a narrow two-story house in the background, and open fields beyond. The photo wasn’t well-focused and you couldn’t make out much of their features. The man was wearing a hat, the woman a plain and modest dress.

He turned the page forward, pointed out other views of the farm, photos of great-aunts and -uncles. With these, he had help from Gerald, who seemed moved by Travis’s enthusiasm. He smiled whenever Travis correctly named the people in the photo, studied Travis with apparent fondness as Travis studied the album.

“That’s my grandfather,” Travis said of a grimy, barefooted boy in overalls. The boy, about twelve years old, wore a cap at a rakish angle; his charming smile had been passed down to the next two generations of Spannings.

Travis stared at the photo for a long time before turning to another section. There were photos of the maternal sides of the family, and a few of the town in Missouri that was closest to the family farm.

Eventually Travis came to photos of Gerald as a young boy. There were not many photos of Gerald and Arthur’s immediate family. One showed Gerald at about the age of five standing next to a chair shared by two smiling toddlers.

“Those were your aunts,” he said softly. “Lizzy and Mary Lee. They never got to be much older than you see them there. Those were the hardest years. Farm was lost and we would just stay wherever we could. I think we were with one of my aunts then. There were two other little babies didn’t even live long enough to take a picture of them. A little boy, Charlie, and another girl, Bonita. That about broke your grandmother’s heart. I didn’t get to know the babies, of course, but I sure missed Lizzy and Mary Lee.”

“What happened to them?” Travis asked.

“Oh, the babies just never were likely to live; they were both born in the winter, and one came early. They each only lived a few days. And the girls, they caught a fever and I guess they just weren’t strong enough to fight it.” He ruffled Travis’s hair. “So I was pretty excited when your daddy came along. I’d started to think I wasn’t ever going to have anybody else to play with.”

Travis smiled and turned to another page. There was a grainy photo of Gerald, about nine, standing with his father and several other men in the doorway of a boxcar.

“Look at that sorry bunch of stiffs,” Gerald said, laughing.

“Who took the photo?” I asked.

“Oh, I think it was one of the wives of the other fellows. She stayed with my mother when my mother was pregnant with Arthur. Mama didn’t want to leave the sugar beet farm. She said she wasn’t going to have any more babies after this one, and she wasn’t going to lie down in some hobo jungle to give birth to her last child.”