“Hey Pop—?”

“Here’s my forty cents. Plus a dime for the tip.” The way the old man’s hand clings curlingly to the quarters in offering them betrays that they are real silver to him instead of just cut-copper sandwich-coins that ring flat on the bar top. Old values. The Depression when money was money. Never be sacred again, not even dimes are silver now. Kennedy’s face killed half-dollars, took them out of circulation and they’ve never come back. The metal got sent to the moon. The niggling business of settling their bill delays his question about Mom until they are outdoors and then he sees he can’t ask it, he doesn’t know his father that well. Out here in the hot light his father has lost all sidling intimacy and looks merely old—liverish scoops below his eyes, broken veins along the sides of his nose, his hair the no-color of cardboard. “What’d you want to ask me?”

“I forget,” Harry says, and sneezes. Coming into this heat from that air-conditioning sets off an explosion between his eyes that turns heads around halfway down the block and leaves his nostrils weeping. “No, I remember. The nursing home. How can we afford it?—fifty bucks a day or whatever. It’ll suck us right down the drain.”

His father laughs, with a sudden snap to retrieve his slipping teeth, and does a little shuffling dance-step, right here on the baking sidewalk, beneath the white-on-red BUS STOP sign that people have scratched and lipsticked to read PUS DROP. “Harry, God in His way hasn’t been all bad to your mother and me. Believe it or not there’s some advantages to living so long in this day and age. This Sunday she’s going to be sixty-five and come under Medicare. I’ve been paying in since ’66, it’s like a ton of anxiety rolled off my chest. There’s no medical expense can break us now. They called LBJ every name in the book but believe me he did a lot of good for the little man. Wherever he went wrong, it was his big heart betrayed him. These pretty boys in the sky right now, Nixon’ll hog the credit but it was the Democrats put ’em there, it’s been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson—the Republicans don’t do a thing for the little man.”