Including mine.

It announced my father, who spent his last solvent years suing his mother and his last lucid ones writing down what a stranger on the phone told him to buy.

It announced Marcus, twice, and the second time it announced him too loudly for the offense.

It announced Rosa, who spent nine months of it on her sister and does not regret one dollar.

It announced my grandmother, who had every quiet lawful option available to her, and chose a table, and six weeks of rehearsal, and an audience.

And it announced me. It announced a woman who was handed proof at thirty-two that she’d been right about her family all along, and who then spent seven years sitting in that chair, and who never asked one question across three years of Thursday lunches because she did not want the answer to complicate what she’d been given.

I have lunch with Rosa on Thursdays now. There’s a place on Sixth with white tablecloths and a waiter named Anton whose kids’ names she knows.

We order dessert before the main course. She taught us both that.

End of Part Two.