I came back to the family this summer, just to see how they've been. When I was little I used to play doctor with the cousins that are not sitting on the torn chaise lounges at the end of the pool, under the sun-worn umbrella that used to glow rainbow colors. The boys have taken their fathers’ places drinking crappy beer and complaining about their needy, useless girlfriends who spend all their money but have great sex, and I guess all girls wants to be like their mothers, because they complain about their boyfriends while really flaunting their pearls and trying to be the best. I walk towards the overhang and trip on a piece of wood sticking out of the dilapidated old deck. A hand reaches out to help me regain my balance, and I look up at the cousin who until that moment had only been known to me as the nerdy bastard child of Genine’s second husband and some tramp who left her baby with his father who subsequently left the baby with his step-mother and took off. The family never let the boy forget it. I smiled and raised my eyebrows at the sad-looking deck, gaping at one side, rusty nails sticking out of the other. The cousin remarked that it looked like a lawsuit waiting to happen and that people kept on promising to fix it, secretly hoping that each other would. I laugh at his capacity to be bold about the undercurrents of the family, and embarrassed, I have to admit that I no longer remember his name. He smiles again and tells me it’s no big deal, he’s just Trevor and hands me a beer that tastes like gasoline. I comment as much, and he laughs so loudly that the girl cousins halt their gossip for a moment to stare and whisper. I shrug and take another drink of gasoline. Trevor points to the pen behind my ear and tells me I must be used to better alcohol, being a college grad and a published writer and all. I shrug again and I wonder what he ended up doing with his life and his brains. Without a hint of regret, he tells me he took his father’s place in the family used car business, and for a second I can see how caged he feels here, but he smiles and shrugs it off. I nod, and realize that if I hadn't been too pushy for a girl I would be stuck here too. I turn to look around me at the decaying brick wall surrounding the pool area, and my eye catches on my eldest cousin Rachel, now married, floating in the pool, her giant hundred-karat diamond shining on her finger as the wall crumbles down behind her. Her eldest child, a boy of three or four, is drinking Pepsi out of a 2-liter almost as big as he is, and I suddenly feel out-of-place with my black pumps and New York summer strapless, and I laugh and down the rest of the gasoline beer as it occurs to me that my world is so much bigger than I ever would have thought, and I’m unexpectedly happy to have my one-bedroom over a New York alley.