We loaded china plates with food: cheese, fruit, two tins of smoked oysters, a knitted rope of French bread, chocolate bars. We had coffee in a burnished silver pot. We layered everything onto a room-service cart and trundled it all back to the sitting room.

“You know, we shouldn’t eat this with the brandy on top of your Colombian because we’ll get fat at our age.”

“Our age?” Dottie said. “Our age together is one hundred and two.”

I said, “Then who cares?”

“Well, I don’t. But what about?” she asked.

“Being a fat one-hundred-and-two-year-old.”

“I know,” said my mother. “Especially at your age and really fat because of all the reefer you smoke and drink brandy and then you eat.”

Fredo, the freckled dog, sat in earnest patience, politely begging. I fed him an oyster. “Poor old dog,” I said.

“You know he isn’t?” my mom said. “That’s son of Fredo; Fredo Two.”

“Can’t be. Same dog,” I said. “I wrote a poem on enantiotropy.”

“It hurts me to laugh,” said Dottie.

“I wrote in a chorus of parents who were children, anti- fathers and anti-mothers. They admitted, yes, they had been parents, but no, it didn’t count.”

“The Fredo you remember was really old and a beach- ball, a tubbo,” Dottie said.

I rolled down my pants’ cuffs and positioned my feet back in my shoes. “If we get snowed in here, I just pray Raf can make it.”

The fireplace log burned through and slumped suddenly, thumped, releasing a swarming spiral of red sparks.

“My heart!” Dottie said.

“Eat a pear,” I said.

I told her the little port city in Cameroon where Mario and I had stayed couldn’t be found on maps, that the only way in was to ferry down from Calabar. I said that the Mermoz, one of our hotels, had a beer machine, and that each night the guests would get drunk and sing, “I go backwards ever; forwards, never.”

“So what?” Dottie said. She had cleared a space on a writing table with her forearm and dropped her head. An afghan made a drape tent over her.

The telephone out at the registry desk jangled.

“Who am I?” I said to the caller. “Who are you?”

I yelled to my mom, “Someone named Paul?”

“Say hi and sorry but I’m too tired to talk right now,” she said.

“Dottie’s wasted,” I told him.

Down in Wasnascawa, there was still light but it was burning out fast by four that afternoon. Blizzard-driven, the surf came against the sea wall with crashes that spattered down into a smaller noise, like applause for home runs at some distant stadium.

Ice had shellacked the boardwalk under me, so for traction I made each step a stomp. There was a paste-white fog. The wind beat my hair forward, gave me blinders on both sides.

I shoved into a year-round bar called the Ocarina.