“I wrote Poppa,” he says, looking down from his 5’9″ height to my seven-year-old self scrunched on a lumpy sofa. “I told him you ate turtle soup.” He paused. “And spinach.”

It was the spinach that was more remarkable.

Maybe a little explanation is in order.

We were in the cramped sitting room of a temporary rental, a staff cottage on the ground of a sprawling Edwardian hotel in a London suburb. A few months earlier, he had uprooted us— myself, my two-year-old brother, our new stepmother—from Brooklyn to England so he could take a new job. Two years earlier, months after my brother was born, our mother had died suddenly of unrecognized leukemia. Moving to London—which my father visited most months on