I’m nine. I stand behind a leather couch in the larger area of the daylight basement everyone calls the rumpus room. It’s Easter Sunday and cool and hazy outside but not enough so that my grandfather will need to ignite the fists of coal already mounded in the grate of the fireplace. Three of my cousins play Monopoly. The dice on the game board fall like whispers. The broader family argues and chats upstairs: My mother and sisters, my grandparents—the six who live here along with me—a...
