“Question,” my dad says, ambling down the stairs, looking like a parallel-universe version of Jonah, from his close-set brown eyes to his towering height and large frame. He gestures toward the fireplace. “Too self-aggrandizing?”

Centered on the mantel is the framed cover art to his book, Black Robe, Black Soil: The Jesuit Mission and Agriculture in the American West. “No, that’s great,” I say. “It looks good with the matting.”

“Yeah, they did a nice job at the frame shop.”

“You sure it’s safe there?” I ask. Our house is carefully undecorated, a zone free of valuables and breakables. Mom affectionately calls Jonah a bull in a china shop, and the comparison is apt. It’s not his fault — he can’t help his size or his lack of coordination or carefulness. Maybe he can’t help the fits of temper, either. But everyone — and everything — is safer with the minimalist approach. And even though I miss acting, there is an aspect I really enjoy about helping design sets, which is being able to fill a world with all kinds of neat objects — and they don’t get broken unless they’re supposed to.

My dad reaches to touch the frame and glances at Jonah. “He could reach it, but it’s not that flashy. It should be safe.”

I nod hopefully.

It’s the only item on the mantel.

I follow Dad into the kitchen. Half the table is smeared with oatmeal, and the other half is covered with students’ assignments from Dad’s senior seminar course at Reed College: Saints and Sustainability in Environmental Practice. I barely understand his area of study, but he says I’ll understand it better when I take his 200-level course — something about nomads and the renaissance in the American West or something equally glaze-worthy. It’s inevitable, though: Reed, being free to children of faculty, is my destiny. And I’m lucky, I know, to have an education waiting and paid for. Cammie says I’m also lucky I don’t have to deal with the exhausting task of choosing a college, but it’s not as if I’m oblivious to my friends’ excitement as they plan school visits and come back full of stories about cross-country flights and sprawling campuses and fraternity parties. What can I contribute to these conversations? Oh, I met my dad for lunch at Reed and had a surprisingly serviceable turkey burger in the commons. Yeah, no.

“I’ll move those,” he says, gathering the papers into a pile. “Sorry. Behind on grading. So what’d you learn in history today?”

I smile and shake my head at my dad’s standard version of how was your day as I wipe up the oatmeal. “I learned about the fantastic relationship between Pope Innocent IV and Güyük Khan, and all the great things they did to dissolve the hatred between the Christians and the Mongols.”