was nothing resembling a grin on his face as he stood next to a face I knew. I’d seen it in a handful of pictures in the family album my mother kept in the front room of our small apartment. It had been next to her family Bible, and the envelopes she said were for important papers. Nat and my birth certificates, my parents’ wedding license, the number to the detective who always called to check on my father if he’d gone too long falling asleep on the front porch.
Next to the Bible, she’d stacked a thick photo album. There were baby pictures of me and Natalie, things that only a first-time parent would keep—locks from our first haircuts, pictures we’d drawn in pre-school and dozens of photos from her family in California. In the back of that album was a handful of images, not as well kept as my mother’s, all of our father’s people. His parents, who had died one night, just like my mother had, exactly for the same reason. My grandfather Lenny had gotten drunk. We’d heard rumors from the family, things that got passed along like how many husbands a certain cousin had or how many times someone had been in jail. Lenny had been a drunk and had passed that habit down to my father. There had been whispers told behind our backs, when the gossips thought Nat and I slept: Lenny and his wife Clara had never gotten over the loss of her brother. They’d been close at some point but had fallen out when her brother married a woman Clara didn’t like.
I’d only heard the story once, but knew it well enough that seeing my grandfather and Isaac wasn’t a much of a surprise as it should have been.
“It’s Lenny,” I told Willow, nodding toward the picture.
“Isaac’s friend?”
“And my father’s father, Will.”
“What?”
We traced the string, how it moved up, linking Clara to Sylv, Sookie’s brother. I glanced over at the O’Bryant tree, moving my fingertips along it and saw the timelines were nearly even. For every Lanoix family member that married and had children, so went an O’Bryant. Nearly every year since Sookie’s death, there had been a birth, a marriage on Willow’s side of the family.
“It’s the same,” I said, glancing at Will, noticing that her eyes had gone wide again as she quickly scanned Roan’s letter.
She moved her fingernail over the pages, stopping when she came to Isaac’s name. She looked up at me. “He almost…” Will shook her head and I caught the glint of tears between her lashes. “Isaac might have had a good life,” she read, “with Winston, his son and maybe that would have been enough. But for Winston’s birthday, he wanted the boy to meet his family, to bring him to his sister and hope that his son would be the one to bring them back together.” Will’s throat worked, as though she had to swallow the large knot that blocked her voice. “The plane they were on crashed somewhere off the South Carolina coast and Isaac and Winston went on to be with Riley before the boy had turned five.”
“That was why…” I closed my eyes, wondering for a second if things would have been different. If my life would have changed if Isaac hadn’t crashed with his son, if his sister and Lenny had never been forced into the sorrow that took over their lives. “My father said once his folks were sad people. There had been so much loss. Too much, it seemed. He said they never laughed. They never…”
Willow came to my side, curling an arm around me and I hugged her close, looking at the pictures, the endless strings that weaved in and out, that touched and moved and connected all these lives.
“What else does it say?” I asked her and she lifted her hand, passing over the letter for me to read.
“There is a force at work that cannot be explained,” Roan had written. “Something that moves through the ages. The same thing that made it possible for me to be an uncle in New Orleans, that brought me to Riley and Isaac in a D.C. library, and also to a young woman who wanted to learn, so she could show her young daughter, Willow, that a woman was a force to be reckoned with. It led me to you to me as well, Nash, when you were scared, when you needed a father because yours had not been