So I never asked.
“Hey Jujubees,” Stefan said. It was his nickname for his honorary aunt. “My mom wants to trek on a camel across the Sahara Desert. Can you take her? She was thinking a couple of months, maybe. She needs a break from me and, oh boy, do I ever need a break from her.”
“You’ve been home for like, ten minutes. What, did you hit the ground hard?”
“What you think is the end is really the beginning.”
“That’s deep, man,” Julie said.
“I know, man.”
“I think you need to seek solace in nature, Stefan,” Julie said. Nature was Julie’s prescription for everything short of an arterial stent, and she was full of suggestions. She could give Stefan the keys to her family’s cabin. （Her “cabin” was a ten-bedroom flagstone pile in Door County with four cub cabins on the same woodland site, where all of us had stayed many times.） Or he could go to Mendota County Park and find a soldierly stand of trees that, even in the leafless deeps of winter, would shelter him.
“This is a great winter camping tent right here,” she said. “You can test yourself by sleeping out a few nights. By morning, you’ll appreciate your mom and your humble bed.” She brought a digital thermometer on a leather cord that set off an alarm when your body temperature got too low—“In case you don’t realize you’re freezing”—stormproof matches—“So you don’t end up like a Jack London story”—a red sleeping bag of Everest caliber and an inflatable down-filled camping bed that packed down to the size of a wallet “for meditating in the holy wild.” She brought him cave-aged cheddar, pumpernickel bread, homemade truffle risotto from our favorite snobby diner, Racine Kringle, chocolate chip cookies with walnuts and coconut, and the largest jar of Nutella I’d ever seen.
Stefan said, “I accept these spectacular gifts from your spectacular self. And I promise to take my Nutella to the cathedral of nature.”
Julie always had a better everything. When Stefan told her that the list of therapists he got from his parole officer hadn’t been updated in fifteen years, she promised to email him some recommendations. I was glad he trusted her, but it made me wistful too. I wasn’t Julie, representative of the new and more efficient universe. I wasn’t a fixer with treats and answers. I hugged her. She’d brought me ten novels, five sweaters and the kind of lounging pajamas she imagined French writers wore while they composed.
Later that night, after I’d placed my phone on its charging station, the screen lit up with a text. It was so late that I knew it was the girl with the little voice.
How is Stefan? Did you tell him about my calling? Did you remind him not to talk about that night?
I hadn’t yet. I didn’t know how. And he would ask why. I turned the phone off.
4
It had been over a month since Stefan came home. If I didn’t ask my extended family to come celebrate his homecoming soon, it would look to him and to them as though I were ashamed. “You’re overthinking this,” Julie said the next time she stopped by. “We’ll just have a party with lots of food. We can have it at my house to avoid the usual ‘greeters’ who tend to camp out at your doorstep.” I agreed, especially when Jep pointed out that hosting a coming-home-from-the-penitentiary party at a house with picketers was like hosting a pool party with piranhas.
Julie even tied a yellow ribbon around a tree in her yard that Sunday afternoon. We set out platters of pastitsio and dolmades and huge bowls of salad salty with olives and feta for parents and my sisters and Jep’s sister, all their husbands and children. We all gathered at the table-for-twenty in Julie’s huge dining room, which reminded me of the kind of hall where a sixteenth-century king would have hosted a warrior banquet. Hal set up card tables for the kids.
Once we were serving dessert, I spoke up.
“Guys, all of you, Stefan has been having the worst time trying to find a job. He’s tried everywhere, and he doesn’t seem to get anywhere. Even the people who say they’re committed to hiring people like him, you know, with his status, say that they don’t have any openings. Please, Andy, Amelia, will you see what you can do?” Amelia’s husband Andy owned three lumberyards. Stefan had worked at one of them every summer in high school.
“Don’t put your sister on the spot!” my mother said.
“I’m not!”
“You are a little,” Stefan said.
“Let me think about this,” Andy said.