I’d know the smell of home no matter what. It’s the rosy warmth of hardwood floorboards in the winter, combined with whatever Mom’s cooking. Right now, it’s eggplant Parmesan. I pause in the doorway.

Off to my right, Mom’s seated at the kitchen table, exactly where I left her two hours ago, reading her anthology of American literature. Her head springs up in surprise. Recognition settles on her features, until it’s replaced by a disappointment she attempts to smother, not quite succeeding. With gentle bemusement in her voice, she says, “You’re home.”

“I am,” I reply.

“You’re supposed to be in South Station,” she says.

I take a deep breath, as if extra oxygen is all I need to convince my mom against this plan. “I got off the bus an hour in, and then I . . . I bought a ticket back with my own money. I’ve thought about this—”

But she talks over me. “Fitzgerald Holton, you’re impossible. I’ve booked your hotels. Your brother is packed and waiting for you. You’re not bowing out of this trip. It’s happening.”

“But what if—”

“Everything is fine,” she says, placing undeniable emphasis on fine and closing the heavy cover on the anthology she was reading. She gets up from the table and pushes in the worn wooden chair. “Everything will be fine. You have nothing to worry about.”

I have everything to worry about. “I have a French quiz on Tuesday,” I say instead. “And—I’m going to be really behind if I’m out the entire week.”

“You’ll make up the quiz,” she replies, “and we both know you’ll mostly be missing movies in class and free study time.”

I say nothing. She watches me for a moment.

“It’s ten days,” she continues, her voice softening. “I’ll be okay on my own for ten days.”

I want to point out it’s not only ten days. It’s four years. If Lewis’s experience is any indication, it’s four years, each increasingly disconnected from home. She might not need me now, but she will soon. I hold the comment in, though. I promised myself I’d never throw her situation in her face.

“I know change is hard,” she says, “but give this a chance. You can’t make me your excuse not to.”

She’s not an excuse. She’s a reason, a very good one. But pointing that out would only put us on the road to an argument we’ve had enough times to know neither of us will ever win.

She continues. “You’re really going to make your poor mother—who has three dissertation drafts to read—escort you personally to your brother’s doorstep? Because I will, you know.” The corners of her mouth tug up. “Remember your eighth-grade field trip?”

I can’t hide a smile of my own. I’d tried to stay home instead of going on a history class trip to the Paul Revere House. It was my first overnight field trip, and I wasn’t interested in sharing a hotel room with three guys I barely knew. But when Mom came home and found me playing video games, she promptly drove me into Boston and deposited me with my teacher with strict orders not to permit me to leave under any circumstances. Even if it was horribly embarrassing, the effort she went to was kind of funny.

She catches my smile, and it’s clear she wins this one. I don’t enjoy arguing with her, and the trip will only be a week and a half. For all her talk of dragging me onto buses, she can’t actually force me to choose a college I don’t want to. The least I can do is give her trip a chance. “No . . .” I huff. “I won’t make my poor and very obstinate mother take me into Boston. I’ll absquatulate to South Station on my own,” I say, hoping she’ll enjoy the word choice.

Sure enough, she raises an eyebrow. “Absquatulate?”

“To make off with, humorously.”

“I swear, Fitzgerald, I’m a professor of the English language, and I don’t know half the words rattling around in that head of yours.” She walks to the doorway and straightens my coat.

I can’t help it. The nerves set in. I know she notices the change in my expression, because she places her hands on my shoulders and looks into my eyes.

“Everything will be fine,” she repeats. From the sharpness in her gaze, I’m almost convinced. “You deserve a chance to know what’s out there. If you hate it, I promise, I won’t force you to go somewhere you don’t want to be. If after everything, you still feel SNHU is the best school for you, I’ll proudly send in your enrollment fee. I know it’s a great college—I have been teaching there for twenty years. I just want to know you’re choosing it too.”

I place my hand on the door handle behind me. “Remember you said that when I get back and I’m still set on SNHU. I know what I want.”

Mom folds her arms. “Just humor me,” she says, sounding a little amused.

   Fitz

TWO HOURS LATER, I’m in South Station.

   Juniper

“THIS IS A terrible idea.”

I hear Tía Sofi in the kitchen as I’m walking toward the stairs. Her voice is brassy, like a trumpet in a parade for which she’s the bandleader and every other member. I vent a breath out through my nose, knowing I’m not escaping this conversation. In fact, I might be having this conversation for the rest of my life.

I turn around, preparing to repeat myself for the thirty-fourth time (not exaggerating), and head for Tía.

The kitchen is like every room in the house, dense with inescapable reminders of every Ramírez who’s ever lived under its roof. There’s turquoise stenciling where the soft yellow walls touch the ceiling, hand-painted by my cousin Isabel, who teaches art at the community college in town. My brothers’ homework clutters the desk my abuelo built with wood from his grandparents’ home. The wide window over the counter lets sunlight leap in and land on the faded photograph of the first Ramírez who came here from the city of Guadalajara, four generations ago, hanging in its heavy frame beside the window.

Tía, wearing an expression of consternation, cups a ceramic blue mug in her hands at the kitchen table. The scene is unbearably familiar, right down to Tía’s posture and the tinny classical guitar coming from the radio I’ve given up begging my parents to replace.

I cross the room, shutting off the music and then turning to face Tía, who’s watching me expectantly. Even though I call her Tía, she’s really my great-aunt. She’s sixty-six and never married or had children of her own, so she’s been like a third grandmother to my brothers and sisters and me. Which means one more source of worry about whether I’m eating enough, where I’m going to college, and, of course, how sex is forbidden until I’m forty.