He was watching me now, even as he tipped the iced bourbon in his grip. He laid his left boot on my lap.

For something to do, I pretended I was a radio. I figured Raf could listen or not.

I talked about my Grandpa Amelio, how he had converted his barn and smokehouse and the heavy-equipment garages into studios for the sculptures he and my father did: civic sculptures—statues, monuments; and park stuff—equestrian statuary, Civil War, and Lafayette. I mentioned that my grandfather, by the time he died, had done eight George Washingtons, three on horseback.

A man interrupted me—a chubby, white, curly-haired college-aged man—to beg a dollar for a drink.

“Let go of her shoulder, Greg. Billy!” Raf called to the bartender. “Two for Greg, but over there.”

The Greg man bustled away. The other half-dozen patrons of The Yellow Man were Caribbeans, men and women who knew Raf well enough to greet him by name and leave him alone.

I went on talking family history. I told about roaming the sculpture barn when I was little, wandering among horses’ heads that were taller than I, and huge faces of presidents and statesmen.

“I had a wood-burning kit,” Raf said.

I said my father and grandfather worked twelve-hour shifts when they had a job, until gradually, out of the rock, a shape would appear. And it was sad, I told Raf, to see some of them go. “So we’d have a goodbye dinner; a farewell to the Allegorical Figure of Justice, or to Roger Taney, or to the Symbol of Athletic Competitive Spirit for the University of Eastern Maine.”

“My dad worked as a salesman,” Raf said.

“Then in the end, you know,” I said. “They’d use the statue for maybe the top of the train station in Wilmington or Iowa City. And there it’d be, up with the clouds.”

“Mom hooked rugs,” Raf said. “There they’d be, right underfoot.”

I went on to how Mario, my father, had stopped making monuments in the sixties when the market dried up and there were no commissions. “Nobody wanted eagles on freeway bridges anymore. But we should go to Brigham Park in Philly sometime, Raf.”

“It tops off my dream vacation list,” he said.

“No, listen,” I said. “When I was twelve or thirteen, Mario got his final commission and it was for a bronze water sprite for this marble fountain in Brigham Park. And he used me as his model.”

“Aw, come on, when you were twelve, Paige? Are you sure?”