Jeanette barely spoke. As usual, she shriveled in Mario’s presence. Jeanette moved the food around her plate and looked from person to person and occasionally sighed and dabbed her lips with a corner of napkin. Carmen smiled politely when her second cousin Vivian’s husband complimented her truffled mashed potatoes. She laughed when her uncle, eighty-nine and still a chain smoker, told an unfunny political joke. She asked a question or two about her other second cousin Delia’s new job in real estate. But then Pepe got out of hand again.

“How is Dolores?” he said, turning to Carmen. He knew, like their entire family knew, that Carmen didn’t speak to her mother.

“You know, I spoke to Maydelis in Cuba, Jeanette,” he said, not even waiting for an answer. “She said Dolores won’t stop asking about you. She tells Maydelis constantly that you and her must work to reunite the family.”

“I love Maydelis,” Jeanette said. “We email all the time. I’d love to go to Cuba. Maydelis says—”

“Listen,” Carmen interrupted. “Dolores just means to make trouble—”

“You mean your mother—”

“I mean Dolores—”

“Hey, you know what I learned, Jeanette?” Pepe’s daughter said, staring him down and turning to Jeanette. “Our great-grandmother Cecilia worked at a tobacco factory that still makes cigars.” Jeanette looked uneasy, balling the napkin in her hand. “And our great-great-grandparents probably, our great-great-great-grandparents probably. Like, this whole legacy and you can just buy one of these cigars and like you feel like you’re holding all this history in your hand but you don’t really know what it means and—”

Mario stood, clearly sensing the tension, and said something like “Speaking of cigars, I need a cigarette break.”

Vanessa, always with her froufrou talk, always talking too much. Jeanette asked Mario if he wanted her to go with him. He told her to stay. Carmen excused herself a beat later.

Outside the street was empty, peaceful, her family’s cars packed in the driveway and spilling onto the curb, announcing that hers was a full home. She could hear the stream of conversation as she closed the door. Cuba this, Cuba that. Cuba Cuba Cuba. Why anyone left a place only to reminisce, to carry its streets into every conversation, to see every moment through the eyes of some imagined loss, was beyond her. Miami existed as such a hollow receptacle of memory, a shadow city, full of people who needed a place to put their past into perspective. Not her. She lived in the present.