I showed up unannounced. That's how we always did it at that house, before.

The door opened and my aunt was exactly as I remembered, chipper, asking before I was even fully inside whether she could put on a pot of coffee. I said yes. I knew where everything was. I made it myself.

My uncle came down the hall. I had never met him. He'd shown up from Alaska after forty years, driven by grief and desperation, and my aunt had opened the door the way she always does. He looked at me with the particular suspicion of a man being visited on his turf, fussy that someone had come by before ten in the morning without warning.

I wanted to say: a few years back, you would have been the stranger. Not me.

I didn't say it. I made the coffee.

The house looked mostly the same from the living spaces. Same smell, mostly. Dogs underfoot. My aunt moving around it the way she has always moved, easy and warm and slightly embarrassed, though I didn't understand the embarrassment yet.

At some point my uncle disappeared to the basement and came back with a stack of photographs. His collection, he called it. He laid them out across the table with the easy pride of a man showing someone something they'd never seen.

About ninety percent of those photographs had me in them.

I know that corner of the basement. I know the box, the shelf, the particular dark down there. I've been in those photographs since before he knew the address of the house. But he spread them out and told me about his family while I looked at pictures of myself as a child, and I sat with it, because what else do you do.

After a while he mentioned they had company coming. Would need to get ready.

That's the southern way of saying it's time. I recognized it. I hugged my aunt and told her I'd be back.

On the drive home I kept thinking: you think I'm the stranger here. But you are. And it felt true for about a mile. Then it didn't.

Because here is what is also true. My grandmother died in 2019 and after that the house became a landing place for everyone who was undone by it in different ways. A rotation of cousins with addictions, moving in and moving out, taking what wasn't nailed down. My uncle arrived from Alaska and stayed. The house shows it. My aunt wouldn't let me see my grandmother's old room, the one where I used to lie in the bed and read to her. She said she couldn't see the hooks through the scattered remains of whatever the circus had left behind. Some rooms you close the door on and hope nobody looks.

But I also moved to California. I pulled back when the chaos got too heavy. I said bye for now and kept living my life, which was the right thing to do, and the house didn't hold my spot while I was gone. He moved into the space I left. He's not easy and he doesn't help much and I don't know if I'd call what they have healthy. But my aunt has someone to drink coffee with in the morning. Someone to fuss at and be fussed at by. Someone in the rooms.

There's love in that, even when it isn't pretty.

So I'll be the stranger when I visit. I can live with that.

I know where the coffee is.