What she doesn’t tell him is how horrible a time she had putting up that front, trying not to stand out as she sat there alone with her school backpack and her almost-fourteen years. A pale blonde woman sat down on the bench and didn’t take her eyes off her, until she got a phone call and forgot Soon. Then a nurse came out to smoke, a young male nurse with a tattoo on his arm, and he stared at her too. She still feels ashamed from that look. She stretched out her shirt to cover herself as much as possible and even moved a little away from the portico, but she could still feel those eyes boring into her body. The nurse stayed there a good while, until finally a female nurse came out whom he’d clearly arranged to meet. He grabbed her by the waist, pinched her ass, and whispered something into her ear; she laughed and walked off, shimmying her hips with happiness. Soon felt so much like crying that she had to lock herself in the bathroom and let the tears flow. She cried without understanding why she was uncomfortable: if only she hadn’t seen that nurse, and especially not the two nurses together, with their private jokes and secrets. As she recalls it now her eyes well up again, but Old Man is utterly oblivious. He’s taking out a guidebook on Anatidae, you haven’t seen this one, he tells her, and she tries to take an interest in its pages, her nose still stinging and her eyes tearing up, although maybe, she thinks, it’s mostly a reaction to the newly cut grass, or to the chemical fumigation.

Look, Soon, Old Man says, and he shows her an old photograph of him when he was younger, in his early twenties. He has an enormous parrot perched on his arm, and the colors of its feathers are washed out by the poor quality of the image, but they’re still beautiful, spectacular even. That’s Ruper, he explains, he belonged to a neighbor. Old Man is against imprisoning animals in cages, especially tropical species, but Ruper was fascinating and Old Man had observed him every day, studied his behavior, and that way he’d learned a ton more things about birds; Old Man, like Soon, believes in the virtues of auto-didacticism—why go to school just so someone can tell you what’s in a book? Isn’t it better to disengage, move to one side, and watch? She looks at the man in the photo, older than her, much older, but undeniably younger than the one she has in front of her now, and of course handsomer, surprisingly handsome. In the photo, Old Man’s damp hair is combed back into a pompadour like an old-timey film actor, and he has high cheekbones, a smooth forehead, and very white teeth, nice and new. He’s wearing a jacket and a bow tie; you can’t see what he’s wearing on the bottom because the photo cuts off at his waist. Old Man looks at the camera and smiles; he’s happy. What is it that’s happened to him since then, aside from time? A lot of girls must have liked him, Soon has no doubt about that now. Why didn’t he marry any of them? Why didn’t he have kids? Old Man has never talked about women or children, so Soon presumes he has always been alone. Although, if she thinks about it, why should she assume that? Maybe she should change her conception of things. Maybe Old Man has had a lot of girlfriends, maybe he still does, maybe he’s fathered children left and right, maybe he’s keeping secrets every bit as elegant and decadent as the pompadour he had when he was young. It’s hard to believe when she looks at him now, with his frayed suit and crazy hair, but not when she looks at that photo, which reveals countless other possibilities: a whole entire past.