“Then, all done, I go to sleep,” Mario said. He reached around and gently shut my eyelids with the tips of his callused fingers. “And I’m asleep and sleep and dream of when I was a fish, who is how I start out my life as. A fish, same as everybody.”

“You’re damn straight,” Raf said.

We moved into Mario’s living room, which was huge and not empty, but seemed empty. The blond-wood floors had a high gloss and were unmarked. There was a step-ladder my father had painted red. On a long shelf sat the pieces of his complicated stereo system. In a corner, in a ceramic tub, posed a lemon tree. Lined up side by side against a blank wall were five old white leather armchairs.

The three of us took seats in three of these. Mario perched on the stepladder. “You gotta lot of power here,” he said to me. “In this room, Paige, you got power.”

“That’s news to me,” I said.

“No,” he said. “It isn’t. Who wants music? Who wants I make some stew?”

“Who wants you talk like an American?” I snapped.

My father said, “Some kittens, you think, why didn’t I drowned it when I had da chance? Hey, Raymond, you gotta little daughter, yes?”

“You gotta meet her mom and dad before you get a fix on Paige,” Raf said.

“I got my own fix already,” said Raymond.

We were out in Mario’s yard, looking west over a downhill forest of pines to a country road. East were the four ribbons of Route 95.

“You ever read her poetry?” Raf asked.

“Sure. It was good. Wasn’t very forthcoming. Nothin’ in it about herself, but I liked it,” Raymond said. He turned to me. “Do you like it?”

“My own poetry? I couldn’t say. It’s just mine, like the family dog.”

Mario fed us a stew flavored deeply with wine, onions, dark tastes.

Afterward, he hummed while serving bowls of his spicy, black, blistering-hot coffee.

“You saw Mom last month,” I said.

“No.”

“She told me about it. In Boston. You two went out.”

“I couldn’t see her,” Mario said, and he looked sad. “She was so dressed up.”

On the drive from Mario’s, Raf told about a spot in Mexico where the surfing was good but the beach was crowded by pigs eating litter. He said he came back over the border at El Paso, and went on north across the Great Plains with a seventy-year-old woman who rinsed her mouth with Scotch and drove a used, repainted, resold police car.

“There’s a ride I’m just as glad I missed,” Raymond said.

Raf said he got a New York train in Chicago, a Boston train in New York, but had to get off, sick, in Providence.

“So naturally I called Mario. And he tells me, ‘Raffo! But sure. We fix you like a hole.’ ”