Aunt Jewel was the one member of my family nobody talked of, but everybody talked about. They cared not to spread the news of her travels, hobbies, or accomplishments. Instead, cousins said she was strange. Elders not used to a woman being single and unhappy rather than married and unhappy said she was gay. City folk too provincial to accept the cosmopolitan rumored her head wraps hid a bald head. Uncles whose barbecue she snubbed out of concern for her waistline called her narrow-hipped and cautioned their meat was just what she needed to sprout the man-traps. She never failed to dress like the place she was going to was much more important than the place she was coming from, so when she visited Chicago folks always wanted to know why she was dressed “up” as opposed to down. Only the little kids recognized and respected her eccentricity for what it was—genius sprinkled with the nonchalance necessary to bring it out. I was one of those little kids, and she was the closest thing to a princess I had ever seen. In her thirty-seven years—twenty of those spent in complete surrender to kismet—she had never ached for marriage. She had pulled many men’s creased, bent photos from her wallet, but never labored over wedding invitations. She avoided explaining when the family pressed for juicy details, never divulged if he had asked and she had said no or if he had ever asked at all. She simply discarded their photos and moved on to the next.

But this summer, on a solo excursion to Harlem just to “cross it off the list,” she had met a man named Hakim who owned a barbershop in Brooklyn. After just a couple of his visits to her current city—Memphis—he had asked her to play house with him in New York. She quit her customer service job, shipped boxes to Brooklyn, closed out her savings, and found she had just enough to spare a month of leisure with the big sister she had drifted so far away from. Hakim would come to get her before Thanksgiving.

“What makes you think this man is worth you packing up and moving across the country?” Ma snorted as she turned to open aluminum cans of Aldi’s sweet corn and string beans. Behind her back, Jewel frowned. She refused to dress down for the sake of acceptance but had no choice but to eat down when she came around us. After tasting everything from calabash to quince in their native countries, she never understood why her family never invested in fresh produce, why we couldn’t think to stash away income tax checks for anything more than cars, jewelry, and clothes.

“You’ve always been a skeptic, Ann,” Jewel said. “Shivana, your mama is still as mean as she was the day she came home from the hospital after the Ferris wheel.”