“Hi, kiddo.” To my dad, I said, “I don’t know what you’re cooking tonight, but I’ve been thinking about a chicken cheesesteak all day.”

He tapped my arm. “You got it. And is that Lin’s photo album?”

I held it in my outstretched hand. “Oh, you mean these pictures of her Saturday Night Fever–themed birthday party? Why yes, yes, it is.”

He gave a funny shrug. “My memory is that I looked good in those silver bell-bottoms.”

Juliet poked my cheeks with her fingers. I made a silly face at her. “I plan to give the best ones to Kathleen so she can put them on your Christmas card this year.”

I walked over to Alexis and Eric in their red vinyl booth.

“Gimme, gimme,” my sister said, taking the photo album. “We promise not to laugh too hard, Dad.”

“I’m unable to make that promise,” Eric said.

Dad’s response was to flash us a mischievous grin as he tossed the towel back over his shoulder. “You laugh now until you’re waiting an hour for your dinner.”

He slipped back behind the counter, and Juliet very seriously slid a coloring book my way with one purple and one green crayon. “Will you color with me?”

“Of course,” I said. “Your mom and I used to come here after school. We’d do our homework while Pop-Pop cooked food for people.”

Alexis snorted. “I learned all of my best curse words as a kid from the people who sat next to us at that counter, yelling at whatever was happening on Action News.”

I leaned over the table to see what pictures she was looking at. They were slightly faded, some more blurry than others. My dad and his sister, Aunt Linda, looked like they’d walked off the set of the Stayin’ Alive music video. He had his arm around her shoulders, and they were laughing outrageously at some joke we’d never know.

“She still has those same curtains,” I said.

“They were legends, man,” Eric said.

I looked affectionately at the picture in front of me. “You’re not wrong.”

Alexis looked up and shut the album with a dramatic flair. “Did I read your text this morning correctly? Are you really helping Dean Knox-Morelli clean the abandoned lot next to Linda’s house?”