Jenna Nienhuis

“I’m going to charge you for making photos of my restaurant,” smirks a Dutchman, swinging the service door open and stepping out beside us onto the sidewalk. A waft of coffee beans and the sound of clanking dishes escape narrowly with him. He is outfitted in all black except for the colorful sleeve tattoo running up his left arm. 

My sister Michelle—Meesh—and I stand in front of this dubious man after what is now an embarrassing photo shoot beneath his café’s sign. She has just returned from a run, beautifully dewy-faced, then unmistakably sweaty in other places from the humid summer heat. I am coming back from a walk—jet-lagged, my curly hair abandoning all structure as it surrenders to the moisture in the air. We had planned to meet in the middle of town, and instead, this café stopped us both in our tracks.

Just Jeff reads the sign in tall black lettering. 

“Jeff was our dad’s name,” I blurt out, overexplaining our presence as the American-ness also drips off both of us.  Bikes whir past us in an organized blur. Even after 6 years, it still stings using my dad’s name in the past tense. 

He lights a cigarette and brings it discreetly up to his pursed lips, like I’m sure he’d done thousands of times before. He brushes his other hand through loose strands of sandy-colored hair that had missed his ponytail and exhales the smoke away from our direction.  

“Are you Jeff?” Meesh asks, even though we already assumed the answer.  He nods, taking another drag from his cigarette as my eyes travel to the tiny sterling silver knife studs in his ears. 

Forested stretches of land and wild dunes surround this town of Soest, outside the province of Utrecht in the Netherlands. Pronounced “soost,” not “soast”, like toast, as I had been saying. A charming street of shops and restaurants runs through its center. 

Meesh had come to join my husband and our three kids for a brief portion of our family holiday. She is my youngest sister; there are four of us in total. Traveling together as sisters is familiar and nostalgic, yet this trip feels strange without first excitedly running through every detail of the itinerary with my dad’s travel-loving curiosity.

“It’s just Jeff, you know? Humble and not showy,” he explains. Meesh and I glance at each other and smile. “We open in an hour.”

At my dad’s funeral, the priest made a comment that my dad “lived life out loud”. He wasn’t a life-of-the-party guy and certainly not one for extra attention. But when the priest looked out into the absolutely packed church (joking that he wished he could draw this kind of crowd for mass), my dad’s impact over his 60 years of life radiated. 

“The font of my logo is inspired by Led Zeppelin,” Jeff divulges without prompting. Meesh and I laugh in unison—remembering the British rock band playing intermittently on the car radio as kids. My dad would reminisce about high school dances and how he prayed not to get stuck dancing with someone he didn’t like for all 8 minutes of “Stairway to Heaven.”  

In our young adult years, my dad took Meesh and me to Prague on a business incentive trip, where we ate dinner in caves, and he had to stop us from inappropriate laughter in a museum, like we were kids again (he was laughing with us on the inside). I am thoroughly enjoying this moment of the three of us traveling “together” again. 

After parting ways for a quick change at the Airbnb, we head back into the now bustling cafe. “We’re back!” We smile brightly as he greets us at the counter. “I can see that,” he laughs with an air of endearing sarcasm. 

Inside, there are green seating nooks near the window with golden light fixtures and floral wallpaper.  Jeff makes me a golden milk with half a cup of cloud-like cream, and Meesh a frothy cappuccino. He later delivers us homemade bread “on the house”.  

We leave on a high with a sign from dad, followed by the subsequent sadness that it implies. 

“Thank you, Jeff,” I say aloud. Thank you, Dad.