Five

“Your uncle had an idea.”

“Oh?” Katie addresses her aunt, raising an eyebrow.

“We’d fix up the back room for your mom, your sister would live in the room behind the laundry room and you’d share a room with your cousin.”

There’s a room behind the laundry room? What the heck?

“That’s so Full House, I love it,” says Katie. “Ooo! Ooo! Can I be Uncle Joey?”

“I want to be Uncle Jesse!” her sister shouts.

“It wouldn’t be Full House, it would just be our mixed family,” says Katie’s uncle. She smiles at him. Moments like that she feels a little corner of her plundered heart replenish. Its darkness lightens just the tiniest of shades.

Katie is still exhausted from her weekend labors. Crashing on her uncle’s familiar couch, Katie thanks her lucky stars for her mixed family. A girl who moves four and a half times in the space of a year becomes keenly aware that home is not a place, it is people. Katie is at home with her mixed family, a term her great-grandfather coined the summer before when everyone was with him, taking care of him in his final days. A piece of Katie’s home died with her grandfather, and a piece died when He decided Katie and her sister and her mom weren’t enough, but Katie is far from homeless. No matter where she is, she’s at home with her mixed family.