I can see that Mimi’s mind is made up, so there’s little to be gained by trying to stand in her way.

“And seeing as it’s Hungary,” she says, “we’re going to need another guidebook.”

AFTER OUR STROLL on the Golden Gate, Mimi and I went back to her hotel room. She didn’t wait for me to make the first move. She simply unbuttoned her blouse and took it off.

“What are you thinking?” she said.

“You mean like, now?”

Then she took off her bra.

Afterwards, as we lay in bed, I told Mimi about my father. He hadn’t been killed by a drunk driver. I was three when he simply walked away from a wife and two kids, and never returned. For years, I was sure that it was my fault. Then I blamed my mother. By the time I got out of high school, I realized that I had never known him at all. That he was just a handful of old photographs.

“You never saw him again?” Mimi stuffed all the pillows under her side so she could watch my face. “He never came back?”

Mimi’s mother had had five kids. My mother only had two.

“Don’t know that numbers mean all that much,” Mimi told me. “For a woman, critical mass is generally achieved with one.”

Neither of our mothers had remarried, even though in those days, that was the thing to do. Protection, security, support, companionship. A man was supposed to provide all that. Maybe after the death of her husband, Bernice Bull Shield had figured out that the only shelter she would have in her life would be of her own making.

Maybe after my father left, my mother had come to the same conclusion.

It wasn’t that men didn’t try. Several were even persistent. One guy bought me a bike, an end run around my mother’s defences.

“He bought you a bike?”

“He did.”

“What kind?”

“Think it was a Schwinn.”

“What’d he buy your brother?”

But she hadn’t let any of the men any closer than the kitchen table and a cup of coffee. I don’t know that I would have liked having a stepfather, and my mother never asked me. Maybe after trusting one man, she wasn’t about to make that mistake twice.

Nor had she been willing to lose time over a situation she couldn’t control. She took back her maiden name, fiddled with mine and my brother’s, got a job with the Southern Pacific, and raised two boys.

“So, your father taught you that men can just walk away whenever they feel like it?”

“He didn’t teach me anything.”

“But the example is there.”

I had always wondered what happened to my father, if he married again, had more children, or if remorse had overpowered him and he had lived the rest of his life with regret.

Probably not.