The place is easy to miss. A white stucco wall. An open gate. A small sign. A courtyard with two copper-green male figures peeing into a small pond. The statues are articulated, and as they pee, their hips move and their penises go up and down.

“This is it?”

“I guess.”

“Two guys peeing in a fountain?”

“Cerny,” I say. “He’s supposed to be famous.”

Mimi already has her guidebook open. “Evidently, he’s the same guy who did the giant alien babies in the park. Along with a statue of Sigmund Freud hanging by one hand from a roof.”

“We haven’t seen that one.”

“Not yet,” says Mimi.

I watch the copper-green men pee in the pond, and I have to admit, the mechanics are impressive. Swivelling hips, moving penises. Mimi circles in for a closer look.

“You know what I don’t see?”

These are the kinds of questions I try not to answer.

“Women,” says Mimi. “Where are the women peeing in the pond?”

“Women don’t pee in ponds.”

“No reason why we wouldn’t.” Mimi walks around the statues several times. “Women can pee in ponds just as easily as men.”

I don’t try to argue with this.

Mimi undoes the top button of her pants. “Maybe I should demonstrate just how easily it’s done.”

“Don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Remember what happened on Santorini. In Oia?”

“When I went swimming at the bottom of the Karavolades Stairs?”

“Skinny-dipping. You went skinny-dipping.”

“I left my bra and underpants on.”

“Tourists took pictures of you,” I tell Mimi, not for the first time. “Those photos are probably somewhere on the Internet. You know how embarrassed Tally and Nathan would be if they saw naked photos of their mother on Facebook?”

“I wasn’t naked.”

“And then there was that time at Crypt Lake.”

“Okay,” she says. “There I was naked.” Mimi closes her book and fixes her button. “You know, you’re only old if you want to be old.”

BERNIE WOULD GENERALLY STOP the story at this point and make something to eat. Sometimes it was leftovers, and other times she’d cook a complete meal. And she’d only get back to Uncle Leroy and the Crow bundle after everyone had been fed and the dishes cleared away.

“It was a family bundle. Got opened once a year, so there was the chance it had been misplaced.”

Mimi would nod and finish her mother’s thought. “But you don’t misplace something like that.”

“No,” Bernie would say, as though she were talking to herself, “you don’t misplace something like that.”

“And then the first postcard came.”

That was Bernie’s cue to get the old Hiawatha Tobacco tin out of the cupboard. “The first card we got,” she said, “was from Paris.”