She answered simply, without emotion, “I didn’t tell you everything about them yesterday. They were divorced many years ago. In the early sixties. He remarried. She’s a lovely, kind woman and she’s made him happy.” She looked at me. “Do you know that he liked you?”

“He was very polite to me.”

“I always thought it was my mother who knew how I felt about you, but my father did, too,” she said. “In fact, the only real father-daughter advice he ever gave me had to do with you—at least, I think it was you.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“It was the night before my wedding. He asked me to go for a walk with him. He told me then that he believed the most important thing in the world was caring for someone—really caring for them. He was honest. He said he wasn’t sure I had the kind of deep caring for Peter that a marriage needed. I remember he said, ‘Maybe that only happens once.’ He gave me a hug when he said that. I didn’t ask if he meant you, but I think he did. He used to ask occasionally if I knew anything about you, where you were, what you were doing. I could only tell him that I knew you were married and that you were an artist.”

I drove in silence, remembering Joel Lourie, remembering the day that he saved me from embarrassment in the dining room of the Inn. A man was there with his family—not regular guests, but stop-overs for a day’s rest on a tour of the mountains. As I was serving the man, I noticed a row of numbers tattooed on his arm, above the wrist, and I wondered why he had the tattoo, why the numbers. I was about to ask him about it when Joel Lourie called me to his table. He motioned me close to him and he whispered, “Bobo, I saw you looking at that man’s tattoos. Do not say anything about them. I will tell you later.” After lunch, he came back into the dining room and found me and told me the tattoos were from one of the death camps in World War Two. “That man was a prisoner,” he explained. “He was one of the lucky ones. He survived.” Years later, I painted a portrait of a man with the tattoos and it was purchased by another man with tattoos.

“What are you thinking?” Amy asked.

“About your father.”

“What he said to me,” she questioned. “Do you think he was talking about you?”

“I hope so,” I said.