“Obviously what he wanted was to have a private face-to-face conversation with you. Maybe it’s true he didn’t want to talk over the phone. Or he used that as an excuse. Or it could be both,” Benton says as if he knows, and he probably does because it’s not hard for him to profile Pete Marino.

“So tell me why you decided to go for a stroll all by yourself, dressed in a suit and carrying heavy bags?” Benton gets around to that. “Aren’t you the one who warns everybody about the heat index—the way you just did with the woman on the bicycle a minute ago?”

“I suppose that’s why there’s the cliché about practicing what you preach.”

“This isn’t about practicing what you preach. It’s about something else.”

“I thought a walk might do me good,” I reply, and he’s silent. “And besides I had the theater tickets to pick up.”

I explain that I also had gifts to find at the college bookstore, The Coop. The T-shirt, nightgown and handsome coffee-table book may not be the most original presents I’ve ever bought but they were the best I could muster after wandering the aisles. As Benton knows all too well, my sister is difficult to shop for.

“But that doesn’t mean I don’t know what she likes,” I’m saying, and he isn’t answering.

A popular musical and a peanut butter pie, for example, and Dorothy also will be very pleased with the skimpy Harvard tee that she can wear with her skimpier leggings or jeans. Her Ivy League shirt will be amply filled by her surgically enhanced bosom, and no doubt she’ll inspire many scintillating conversations in the bars of South Beach and Margaritaville.

“And the Cambridge photography book is something she can carry back to Miami as if it was her idea,” I explain as Benton listens without a word, the way he does when he has his own opinion and it’s different from mine. “And that’s exactly how my sister will play it when she shares pictures of Harvard, MIT, the Charles River with Mom. It will be all about Dorothy, which is fine if it means Mom enjoys her gift and feels remembered.”

“It’s not fine,” Benton says as we pass through the deepening shadows of tall boxwood hedges.

“Some things won’t change. It has to be fine.”

“You can’t let Dorothy get to you this way.” His tinted glasses look at me.

“I assume you’ve heard the nine-one-one call.” I change the subject because my sister has wasted quite enough of my time. “Apparently Marino has a copy but he wouldn’t play it for me.”