The screen freezes on my brother’s face, mid-sentence, mouth open in a perfect, pixelated ‘o’. On my end, the ceiling fan is humming, pushing the thick evening air around. On his, in Florianópolis, the morning sun is blasting through the window behind him, turning his silhouette into a black hole of authority. He’s talking about an imobiliária, about impostos, about a buyer who wants to close in 45 days. My sister, from her apartment in São Paulo, is a tiny, stable window in the corner of the Zoom call, nodding silently. And I’m just trying to keep my own breathing steady.
They don’t get it. For them, this is a local transaction. Complicated, sure. Emotional, of course. It’s mom and dad’s apartment, the one with the cracked tile on the balcony that we were never allowed to step on after it rained. The one where the scent of my mother’s feijoada seemed to have permeated the walls themselves. For them, the biggest headache is splitting the proceeds three ways and dealing with the Brazilian cartório, the notary office. My headache is that, and then explaining all of it to a man from the IRS in Austin, Texas.
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