“Yes.” Joey wiggled in her chair. She didn’t want to talk about her grandfather’s numbers, the ones that looked like black-and-blue marks. And she especially didn’t want to talk about her grandfather’s numbers when he was watching TV in the other room and could enter at any moment to chime in on the topic of his numbers. She dug her fingers into the box of Lucky Charms to find the mini Pez dispenser the front of the box promised.

“Well, he got the numbers at a place called Auschwitz.” Her grandmother’s eyes looked like the eyes of the homeless woman who sat with her cat on the side of the clubhouse in her grandparents’ development and got delivered cups of ice water by the golf caddies.

“I took this picture at that place. Auschwitz. I went in the sixties because my family was taken there. I had nothing of theirs. Of ours. I didn’t want to go to this place. Terrible things happened there. I went with a mission. I went to find things they once had touched. Can you understand that?”

Joey nodded yes, but no, she didn’t. She loved her grandparents an amount that was so big she could feel it inside her, in a place in her stomach that now pulsed, straining for its exit route. She didn’t want their lives to consist of some place called Auschwitz, and her grandfather’s numbers, and terrible things.

“I went when your mother was young, alone. Your grandfather didn’t want to come. We’re different. He wanted to go back to Corfu, to show your mother the streets we once walked, the great synagogue we once prayed at. I wanted nothing to do with that version of the past. But I wanted a piece of my own past. My past was not in Corfu anymore. My past was in Auschwitz. I saw a room of hair. Can you imagine? Their hair was probably inside. My father’s. My mother’s. My mother had the most beautiful, shiny, dark hair. I didn’t see shiny, dark hair. It had been a long time. Maybe the hair got rotten.”

Joey wondered why there existed in the world a room of rotten hair. Her forearm immersed in cereal, she finally felt the Pez dispenser. She pulled it out and licked the Lucky Charm coating off her fingers.

Stop talking, she screamed inside.

“Don’t lick your fingers, darling. It’s not a nice habit.” Her grandmother frowned. “So I went to another room. There were a million suitcases. A million. I spent hours in there. I walked inch by inch, looking for a name. My last name used to be Batis. And do you see it here?” Joey squinted. She saw it: BATIS. The suitcase was gray and square, like a large briefcase.

“This is all I have of my family. A picture of their suitcase. They took it with them when the Nazis ordered them to gather in the scorching heat at the platia. That was a grassy area with walking paths between the Old Fortress and—”