“Look at you,” he says to Rian, who is pale and exhausted from last night’s asthma attack. “You’ll be bigger than me soon.”

That’s possible. Rian is thirteen and sprouting fast while our father gets smaller each year, the black strands of his hair now overrun with gray. What he lacks in muscle and youth, he makes up for with brains, Mother says. He is an engineer. He builds the dams that hold the water that feeds the cornfields and fills the bathtubs of the people who live in town who’ve forgotten how to wash in rivers.

“And you.” He pinches my cheek. “You are even more beautiful than the last time I was here. I’ll have to buy myself a shotgun to keep the boys away.”

The idea of him armed with anything but a pen and a contour map makes me laugh. He loves reading books, drinking scotch, and cutting wood-block puzzles with Rian in the lean-to behind the kitchen. And what good will a gun do when he’s not here to take shots at those limber night-boys who might, one day, creep over my windowsill? He lives in faraway Johannesburg with the other children, who I imagine are red-haired and clever, with skin as white as smoke. Family friends stop them on the street corner and marvel at the resemblance. “Goodness,” they say. “You certainly take after your father. It’s uncanny.”

The others naturally take top billing. They are classified “European,” and Europeans are the kings and queens of everything. We are not European. Our skin has color. Our hair has curl, but not the steel-wool kink that’s hard to get a comb through, and praise Jesus, Mother says, for that small mercy. Our green eyes shine too bright in our brown faces, as if to confirm the combination of white and black blood that flows through our veins.

When he is here, he loves to tell us the story of how they met. Him on a work trip to the land title office in Mbabane, and her, slotting ancient charts into the right pigeonholes in the map room. Mother in a blue polka-dot dress, making order of the chaos. She smiled at him. A smile like an arrow to my heart, he says. Beautiful and shocking, all at once. And how he knew in a flash that, no matter what, Mother would be a part of his life. And so she is. Not the whole part, he forgets to add, but a small, bright piece of his life that’s hidden away in Swaziland. We are an add-on to Father’s regular life. We are the secret well that he drinks from when no one else is looking.

Mother sits cross-legged on the flowered carpet and beams to see us perched on his lap. She’d dip the scene in amber to preserve it if she could. We are together for one day and one night, and that will have to be sufficient until the next time.