“So your napkin tells me what you’re doing now,” she says. “What have you been up to the last twenty years or so?” Her dark eyes soften. “After that night, where’d you go, Ezra Stern?”

“Jewish camp.”

“I know that,” she laughs. “And then? Like…everything kind of disintegrated. A few weeks after you and your mom left for New York, your dad left, too. Next thing I know, there’s a For Sale sign in your front yard. You guys disappeared.”

“I went to camp as planned for a few weeks, and then we moved to Italy.”

“Italy? I didn’t expect you to say that.”

“I didn’t expect it either. Dad got that job he’d been wanting, but it took us overseas.”

“How was that?”

“It was hard at first. I missed…”

You.

That one unspoken word lands on the table between us, invisible but completely present. Kimba bites her lip and glances down at her menu.

“I missed everyone,” I continue. “Missed home, but then I realized it was the best thing that could have happened.”

“How so?”

“We moved into this neighborhood where several basketball players lived.”

“Like, American basketball players?”

“Yeah. Guys who never made it to the NBA, used to be in the league, couldn’t get a contract. Whatever. They ended up playing for an Italian team. And guess what?”

“What?”

“Half their kids were mixed like me. Literally white moms and black dads everywhere.”

“Professional basketball players marrying white women? Shocking,” she says with a laugh. “So you fit right in, huh?”

“Well, I was still me, so I’m not sure I’d ever ‘fit right in’ anywhere.” We chuckle. Basically a case of it’s funny because it’s true. “But there were people who understood my in between-ness—who’d faced some of the same challenges living in America that I had. It was the perfect situation for me to be in at that time.”

“How long were you there?”

“Four years. All of high school. My parents actually stayed a few years after I returned to the States for college.”

“What school?”

“Howard for undergrad. UCLA for my master’s and doctorate.”

Her brows elevate. “An HBCU. Another thing I didn’t expect.”

“My mother made sure I understood my Jewish heritage, but when I look back on my childhood, besides your family, I didn’t have a lot of influences from that other part of me. I needed that, too, and Howard proved to be the perfect incubator to grow my confidence—my understanding of myself. The whole me.”

“And then grad school in Cali?”

“Right.”

“Is that where…” She glances down, runs a finger around the rim of her glass. “You met Aiko in California?”

“Yeah. I had just started my doctorate at UCLA. She was taking pictures at a party not far from campus.”