Because of the night club, La Busola, at the corner of the beach Dad also kept all the windows tight shut at night so he couldn’t hear the music as much. Even though it was a cool morning with the rain and all, it was still as hot as it had been the day before in Mom and Dad’s room.

The air smelled like Mom and Dad. I could smell Mom’s face cream and Dad’s morning smell, sort of like the smell of burned toast at a distance with a little bathroom smell mixed in. Not really bad, but different enough so you noticed it.

One side of Dad’s face looked crumpled up because he always slept on that side. And his hair was all pushed over, so he looked a lot more bald than in the day when it was brushed straight back.

Lucrezia said, “Buon giorno,” put the tray down, then went over and opened the curtains, the windows, and the shutters. When she had snapped the shutters back into place against the wall of the pen-sione, she asked Dad if he wanted the windows left open a little. This embarrassed me because I knew Lucrezia thought the room smelled “close” as the English would say. But Dad said no, so she just shut the window up again, and I knew how she would tell her mom about how it was like a cave in there and how these Americans were not like the Germans and English who kept their windows open and liked fresh air.

When she was gone Dad got out of bed, went over to the sink, and peed in it. He always did this in rooms with no toilet in them. The toilet was down the hall, and all he had was the bidet or the sink to go in unless he wanted to stand in the shower and spatter his feet or walk down the hall in his pajamas and meet people who would look at him and his crumpled face and pushed-up hair.