I looked at Jay.
“Dad, your knee surgery.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. I just need to rest.”
Jay pressed his lips together. “How is rest going to help something that needs to be removed?”
His dad ignored this. “Hope you all are hungry. It’s just us.”
We followed him inside, into the kitchen, the counter lined with aluminum foil pans propped over blue flames. Jay passed me a paper plate. “Aunt Renee and Uncle P aren’t coming?”
“They’re in Jamaica.”
“What about Ricky and them?”
“They’re”—he waved a hand in the air—“being messy.”
We ate in the living room. Kaitlan Collins was on TV talking about civil servants bracing for the new administration. And then: Gazans drowning trying to get aid. A hundred women and children, killed. My stomach turned itself inside out. Mr. Wright shook his head. That refrain that failed in so many ways. Not Palestinians, but women and children. Look: They didn’t deserve it. But who deserved to be torn apart by an artillery shell with the words “Finish Them” on it?
Mr. Wright, chewing forcefully, peered over his glasses at me. “I hear Tristan’s in DC. Hope he’s not giving you a hard time.”
I found a neutral voice. “I really don’t see him much.”
“I’m glad he got away from that Shannon girl. Think moving was good for him.”
Jay said, “That was years ago. He has a new girlfriend now.”
Mr. Wright grinned at Jay. “I’m just happy you foundoneandkeptone. You know, your mom and I got married at your age?”
Jay stabbed his mac and cheese with his fork. I knew he wanted to make a quip about them being divorced. His mom, long moved on, was on her fourth husband.
“I spoke to her the other day,” Mr. Wright said. “What’s this money thing?”
“I’m surprised she told you about that.”
“I know she can be all over the place. But she does love you. She’s struggling.”
“How much money doyougive her?”
He grunted. “She’s not my mother.”
On TV, they were playing a clip from a celebratory rally in Pennsylvania. “A buffoon,” Mr. Wright muttered, squirting Dijon mustard into his baked beans.
Jay folded his outdoor clothes over his desk chair. “We don’t have to stay the night if you don’t want.”
“I don’t mind.” Swinging my legs onto the bed, I mindlessly opened the photo album on his nightstand. There were several pictures of him as a calm, squinty-eyed baby, then a hyperactive toddler.
I paused on a photo of Tristan and Jay as kids standing beneath the orange tree in Jay’s backyard. “I haven’t talked to Milan in weeks.” The confession came out unexpectedly, like I’d been pressing it down with my tongue.
Jay was splashing water on his face in the bathroom when he looked up. “What happened?”
“We had a fight.”
He patted his face with a towel and cut off the bathroom light. “What was it about?”
“I don’t even know. We were just mean to each other.”
“Tristan and I had a bad fight once.”
