Family

I knew I had to shift away from my best friend Mark when I felt those tears start up in my eyes at the end of the most beautiful movie I’d ever seen. He sat right next to me, baby-faced and bug-eyed, his braces making him look like he was always in the middle of saying something. I was already embarrassed from when one of the characters, C.W., took his shirt off and I felt my shorts start to get tight. Those two hours I spent with Bonnie and Clyde, my sneakers stuck to the th

The small coffee can half-filled with bacon grease that sat on the back of Grandma’s old gas stove always lent the kitchen the smell that breakfast could be right around the corner. She’d begin every meal with a teaspoon of it thrown into a black cast iron skillet, and the two-bedroom house would come alive as if it were dawn’s first light even if the sun had set an hour before. I sat on the glittery vinyl chair by the yellow linoleum table and watched her, my legs swinging b

The only thing I knew about my great-Aunt Bessie before she passed away while I was in class during my first year of school was that she had her left leg amputated from a bad bout of diabetes, and that she had a trunk that my whole family wanted, especially my grandfather’s side since she was my grandpa’s sister. She lived in a nursing home; I’d heard that at the dinner table, and to hear the family tell it, she had some money, too. I arrived home from school to my mother cry