It was good weather for May. People were lying in the park, wearing short-sleeved tops against all odds and calling it summer. You walk outside with a jacket out of habit and regret it twenty minutes later. You’ll sunbathe but you won’t wear sun cream because somehow it feels like the sun can’t hurt you. If you’re so inclined, you start thinking those romantic springtime thoughts, where you wonder what summer might be like and whether you will be happy because happiness seems a right when so many people are smiling in front of you.

That couldn’t be my father on the phone. Forty years had gone by without a single card or message from him, and for all I knew he was dead. No, my elderly neighbor was teasing me.
“Pete dear, I’ve got a client on the other line,” I said.
“Mary Edwina, please listen.”
I listened. Pete could not have known my horrid middle name.
“I’m Edward Keller. I’m your father.”
“Hold on,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

It was Friday in Madrid. Hot. Humid. Noisy. The streets of the Centro were crowded with tourists foreign and domestic. By eleven A.M. it was almost impossible to move through the Prado for the crowds. Tour guides drilled pathways through the mobs with their colored pennants. Echoing off the marble walls and high ceilings, the din was as loud as the inside of a railway station at rush hour. The air dripped with garlic and stale breath.

From this distance, he’s not easy to see. Not with the naked eye. He’s old. I know that’s true. How old, I don’t know. He sits there on a beat-up couch on the porch, a big porch that wraps around part of the house and has screens on the sides to keep the bugs out. But it can’t do that too well if it’s just on the sides. I see him use his hand to swat away the eye gnats. They can be irritating late on a warm desert evening.

Henry Baker sat in his wheelchair outside the Caring Hearts assisted living facility in Mañana under the shade of a tree that he reckoned might be almost as old as him. Then again, maybe not. He was eighty-five and the home was built in the early 1950s, so unless the tree was already here, it may be only about seventy years old. He remembered when the building went up.

At twenty-three, Marion Jennings (née Gustavson) is too old to be homesick.
Or so her mother says during their once-a-month, long-distance chat.
“There’s no time for wallowing, Marion Louise. You have a husband and a new baby to care for,” she tells her. “Instead of crying about living in paradise, you should be attending to your husband’s career.”
This is not what Marion wants to hear.