I awoke alone after the party, unable to recount how I had arrived where I had, but nonetheless oriented immediately. I rose and dressed in something light and too informal to wear out, because in some sense I was home.

Familiar doors yielded familiar results; all was where I knew it would be. Soon I had collected what I needed, stepped into the brightness out of doors, and encountered my first person of the day. Though the sun had long been high, and the day was promising to be summery, her body, on her patio chair, was still curled around her coffee cup as if it were the only source of warmth in the universe. I realized as I was sitting down that I would always think of that pose as transcendently feminine, as I greeted, and smiled with, my mother.

She uncurled just a fraction, in the way a napping cat acknowledges your entry to its room, and her eyes were fixed on my hands as she moved. "I'm glad you found that cup again," she said, as I lifted it to my lips, and drank what she had brewed and left for me to find. "It was your Uncle Bill's, you know," meaning her uncle, my great uncle, who had always been called Uncle Bill, and who had been as much mine as anyone's. "I want to tell you the story of that cup."

I toasted toward her with it, so we could see it as she spoke. White, ceramic, thick enough to be a weapon; enough of an hourglass shape to feel good in my hands. I'd latched onto it as my morning cup in that place a decade or more before. It was curious to find it there, antique but suddenly arriving, but I had never really asked about it.

The eyes we share glinted from her as she spoke, perhaps a trick of the sun. "It was his on the ship in the war, he brought it back with him when he got out. They called him Pop on the ship, you know - he was 26 when he enlisted, and of course everyone else was just boys, because everyone was serving... and of course he had that voice to order them around with..." She trailed off for a moment, and I suddenly remembered being scolded by Uncle Bill as a lad, and it was indeed a voice to note. Resonant, deep - I had immediately heeded it as a child, and also laughed with it when it was merry.

I could see her remembering the voice of the man her mother's sister had married - it resembled, in these qualities, the voice of the man her mother had married, and the one she'd married herself. I realized suddenly that this was no accident, a family taste in how they chose. Her side is simply littered with men who speak always with breadth and depth of sound, if only rarely at any length at all. I blinked at the cup as I traced that through to things said by women about my brother, and about myself, and marveled at having glimpsed one of the whims that has shaped me and mine since before I was born.

"Anyway, " she said, bringing us both back, "he brought that cup and another one back with him from the ship - the other is the broad one without the handle. Every morning as I grew up, your grandfather had that one in front of him, and the one that you're holding was your Grandma's. It was like that until he died... and then I..."

Here she paused and searched for the word, and of course I searched with her:

"Absconded."

We said it together, identically but octaves apart, shaping and pacing the syllables just the same. We began to smile together, but I interjected with a shrug, so we'd not pursue that: "You taught me to speak."

It was her turn to blink, thinking forward to my son, before continuing where I wanted her to continue. "Absconded with them, and brought them here." With that, she fell silent, no further explanation offered. That, quite simply, was that.

Another whim it was, which had shaped the entirety of my day thus far, for I had indeed gone looking for that cup when first I moved from the bed I sometimes call mine. Fortunate I am, I suppose, to have grown something of a taste for participating in others' whims. She spoke again, just at the moment I noted that, before I could decide if that trait was accident or design.

"Your sister is our executrix," she said, referring to the last will and testament of my father and herself. It may seem to have been a tangent, but she knew I would follow it through in the way she meant it: how my sister would not appreciate this conversation in the way that I would, had not shown the affinity I have shown for things the generations have touched. She brought it back on point immediately: "Whenever she does whatever she's going to have to do, you make sure that you wind up with that cup, and the other."

I drew back, openmouthed, as if to say "I'm shocked you'd think it could be any other way," and Mom nodded as if we'd settled something. I inquired as to how Grandma was enjoying her mid-nineties, and the conversation turned away from the cups.

I sat and stared into mine, though, when eventually I'd drained it, and I turned it over a few times in my hands. There was no mark of a maker nor a year, no hint of where it had sailed, on which ocean that I've never seen. No hint of what had been said over it in anger or in jest, as it had been held in the hands of the generations. Only the glazing caught my eye, cracked and crazed just as I've always seen it, in a way that would say family, now, forever, unto me.

I glanced up from it at her, amid one of those damned sentences of hers, and she knew I'd not abscond with it that day, and I knew she'd be pleased the day I did.