He usually arrives alone.

 

He has good luggage, knows a restaurant nobody else has heard of and brings a bottle of something that requires explanation. Nobody is entirely certain what he does for a living, but whatever it is seems to involve travel. He doesn’t have children. He may have never married. He lives somewhere far enough away that the details of his life are assembled primarily through photographs, occasional phone calls and whatever he reveals at Thanksgiving.

 

The children generally like him. The adults aren’t quite sure.

 

Eventually somebody says he thinks he’s better than everybody else.

 

He probably doesn’t. He just left.

 

Every sufficiently large family seems to produce a version of this person. He is the uncle who went to San Francisco, the aunt who disappeared to New York, the cousin who moved to Los Angeles and started doing something nobody back home could adequately describe. He becomes the black sheep not necessarily because he did anything particularly scandalous, but because he violated one of the quieter rules of family life: he chose something nobody around him had demonstrated first.

 

I come from the kind of family where this phenomenon is particularly easy to study. On my mother’s side, I have forty-two first cousins. At that point you’re less a family than a congressional district. We come from a small rural town in West Texas, just outside a border city in Mexico. We’re fourth-generation American and thoroughly Americanized. There is no romantic immigrant narrative hiding beneath this. By my generation, we had pickup trucks, softball, Walmart and the complete American conviction that whatever happened within fifty miles of home was probably sufficient.

 

My father once asked me why I wanted to go to college when I could live at home and work at Walmart. It wasn’t an insult. It was career counseling. There was a job. There was a house. There was family nearby. What exactly was I looking for? I didn’t know, which was probably the first indication that I needed to go looking for it.

 

There was nothing particularly wrong with that life, either. My relatives were blue-collar people who worked, raised families and did what was expected of them. My mother became an RN and had an actual profession, which in retrospect probably gave me some early evidence that the script could be edited. Still, the prevailing philosophy wasn’t exactly make your hopes and dreams come true. It was closer to don’t get carried away. There is a practicality to small-town life that can become a philosophy before anyone realizes it has.

 

Small towns are very good at answering questions nobody has asked yet. Where will you live? Here. What will you do? Something nearby. Who will you marry? We’ll see who’s available. What happens next? Children. The particulars change, but the sequence generally doesn’t. There is security in knowing what comes next, provided what comes next is what you want.

 

The black sheep is usually the person who asks an irritating question: what else is there?

 

For generations, people answered that question by leaving. Before social media, this could turn a relative into family mythology remarkably quickly. A man could leave Texas in 1974 and, within a few years, become whatever the family imagination required him to be: successful, lonely, rich, promiscuous, pretentious, important, possibly all of the above. He came home occasionally wearing something everyone discussed after he left. He brought gifts. He knew restaurants. He had photographs from places nobody else had been. Distance supplied whatever details were missing.

 

There was a particular version of this uncle in many American families. He went to San Francisco or New York. He never quite explained why he wasn’t married. He had friends nobody back home knew and a life nobody completely understood. Nobody necessarily said gay because families once had an extraordinary ability to construct an entire sentence around a word they refused to use.

 

Then, for a generation of those men, the visits stopped.

 

The mysterious uncle in San Francisco got sick. The one in New York didn’t come home for Christmas. Sometimes the family said AIDS and sometimes they didn’t. Years later, nieces and nephews inherited apartments, photographs, furniture, artwork and strange collections of objects from lives they had understood only in fragments. The enigmatic uncle eventually became an estate.

 

There is something terribly sad and slightly absurd about that progression. A family can spend forty years trying to determine exactly what is wrong with you and then divide your silverware. Whatever judgment existed while the person was alive becomes strangely irrelevant once somebody has to clean out the apartment.

 

The modern black sheep has a different problem. He has Instagram.

 

Mystery is much harder to maintain when everybody can watch you eat dinner. Now relatives see the restaurant, the trip, the hotel, the clothes and the occasional photograph taken somewhere attractive. They know what his life looks like while knowing remarkably little about what his life is. Social media has created intimacy without information.

 

Distance also has a peculiar way of looking like money. People see the trip and not the credit-card statement. They see the hotel and not the possibility that you’re working in it. They see California and assume wealth. After enough photographs, an entire financial profile is assembled by people who have never seen a tax return.

 

Then the nieces and nephews become teenagers, which is when mystery begins to lose some of its charm. The interesting uncle who traveled suddenly becomes the uncle who might reasonably purchase a plane ticket. Or a cheer uniform. Or softball equipment. Or contribute to some athletic endeavor requiring several thousand dollars’ worth of objects that appear to be available at Walmart for $38. They may not know precisely what the black sheep does for a living, but they remain remarkably confident about his liquidity.

 

This is partly his own fault. He showed up with the luggage. Occasionally he pays, too, not because he’s rich but because family operates according to a peculiar accounting system in which affection, obligation, guilt and generosity have been commingled for generations and nobody retained a CPA. There is, however, a distinction between I have your back and I am a bank. Every black sheep eventually learns this sentence, usually immediately after paying for something.

 

Still, who else do we have? That may be the contradiction at the center of families like mine. We spend enormous amounts of time annoying one another while maintaining a nearly primitive understanding that when something genuinely happens, everybody gets in the truck. You can resent the cousin who left. You can talk about him. You can decide he thinks he’s better than everybody. But when the call changes from can you buy this? to something happened, the entire accounting system changes.

 

I recognize enough of the black sheep in myself to know that the mythology isn’t entirely accurate. I have three siblings and we’re close. I know where home is. I haven’t escaped my family so much as changed my proximity to it. Estrangement in large families is rarely absolute anyway. It’s more atmospheric. People drift. Alliances form. Somebody gets offended in 2009 and nobody remembers exactly why, but everyone has agreed to maintain it. There are cousins you would never call just to chat who could nevertheless appear in your driveway with jumper cables twenty minutes after you needed them. Family is allowed contradictions that would make any other relationship seem clinically insane.

 

Age, however, introduces an uncomfortable development for the black sheep. Eventually he discovers that the conventional life he rejected came with benefits nobody bothered to advertise. Children, for instance, are enormously expensive for approximately thirty years and then theoretically become adults who notice when you haven’t answered the telephone. The cousins who stayed have children. Their children have children. Forty-two first cousins becomes an expanding republic of people who know somebody who can come over.

 

The black sheep, meanwhile, has spent his life accumulating independence. He moved away, supported himself, made his own decisions and built a life outside the family structure. He may have become so accomplished at self-sufficiency that one morning he realizes he has successfully arranged to die alone. This is the fine print of self-determination that nobody puts on the inspirational poster. Follow your own path; transportation to future medical appointments not included.

 

Perhaps that is why families have always regarded the black sheep with a mixture of envy and pity. He escaped, but escaped to what? He looks at the people who stayed and sees lives constrained by geography, obligation and choices made young. They look at him and see someone who comes home alone. Both observations can be true, and neither tells the whole story.

 

There is no moral superiority in leaving, just as there is no moral superiority in staying. There are simply different bargains. The people who stayed exchanged some possibility for belonging. The person who left exchanged some belonging for possibility. Nobody understands the cost of either bargain at twenty because twenty-year-olds are not particularly interested in actuarial tables.

 

Maybe this is where the black sheep eventually becomes useful. Not as an example of how everyone else should live, but as evidence that there is more than one way to do it. Somewhere in every enormous family there is another kid staring at the perimeter. He doesn’t necessarily hate his hometown, and he doesn’t think he’s better than his cousins. He may love all of them. He simply wants to know what’s over there.

 

Somewhere in the family mythology is an uncle who once wondered the same thing. The uncle who left, the uncle everybody talked about, the uncle who appeared at Christmas with suspicious luggage and stories from places nobody had been. Perhaps his real inheritance isn’t the apartment, the money or the silverware everyone will eventually fight over. Maybe it’s permission. He proved the road leaving town actually went somewhere.

 

Of course, roads work in both directions, and eventually the black sheep gets old enough to understand that too. After a lifetime of proving he could live without the structure everybody else chose, he may discover that independence was never quite the same thing as not needing anyone. With forty-two first cousins, however, the odds aren’t terrible. Somebody should eventually come visit him in the nursing home, preferably the niece with the expensive cheer uniform.