A college professor's father has just been taken to jail. His father was convicted for killing another man who worked with him on their garbage truck. His mother is the one who calls him, and she laments the fact that her son left for a city on the other side of the state from them, and the difficulty of this as a Black family in particular. His Aunt C gets his dad a lawyer, and he trusts her, largely because of her ability to work the system since she served in the Women's Army Corps in WWII. His dad is set free, but pain follows the family. Violence seems to mark the sons and grandsons that come, and leads to jail time for the Black men in his family. He notices how his grandmother will duck away or ignore conversations about these men. Race is complicated in his family, where people's skin tones are varied, yet they are all treated the same by white members of their community. His mother believes that they should never let anyone bring them down, but the bad treatment they receive is difficult to ignore. When the man speaks with his sister years later, they finally remember the name of the man their father stabbed. It makes him think about the duplicity of memory and how it's so often a creation as much as a reality.