Through the streets in my kilt I’ll go.

All the lassies shout, Hello!

Donald, where’s your troosers?

It had never been about the kilt, of course. He was the youngest of seven brothers, none of whom ever married, except him, at the age of forty-seven. Before that, and for years, he and his brothers had run the family department store in Montville, Massachusetts. Back then, their parents dead, the brothers went every year down the Cape for two weeks’ vacation, crammed into a cottage called Beach Rose, until Arlene MacLean met Louis Levine in Wellfleet and took him away. He had deserted one family and only wanted to belong to the next. He’d thought he might wear a kilt to their wedding. “Oh no,” said Arlene. “No kilt.” “But your uncles—” “No kilts anywhere.” “Bagpipes?” “I hate them.” What could be sadder in a marriage than incompatible feelings about bagpipes? Ought they still marry? They eloped, and had a child, and never argued, except for the one thing. It became a running joke: the man wanted a kilt. “I have fine calves,” he said. He immersed himself in everything Scottish: his favorite movie took place on the Isle of Mull, in the Inner Hebrides. “Look at that light,” he would say to his family, who didn’t care for the black-and-white light of the 1940s, not when modern times were right outside the door, and plenty well lit.

Now Arlene MacLean Levine was two months dead, and his son had taken him to Scotland, to tour Mull, its castles and coastline, its birdlife: today they would take a boat to an uninhabited island that promised puffins. David himself didn’t like birds, couldn’t tell them apart, didn’t want to: it struck him as feeble-minded, to stare at the throats and tails of birds for a flush or flash, just so you could name them. Seagull, pigeon, chicken, hawk, that was all you needed. All other birds were sparrows to him. As a child he’d found his father’s ornithological obsession a moral failing: his father had never asked a single question about his son’s life, or any other living human’s. Louis loved animals, ate them; the mass grave of the local natural history museum had made David a vegetarian at age thirteen. Study me, he’d wanted to say to his father: the narrow-footed David, the bearded Levine, the flat-bottomed vegetarian. Write me down in your book.

He’d brought his father to Scotland, paid for everything, in attempt to ease the guilt he felt for living so far away, for having preferred distance all his adult life. He’d given his father birds and haggis and properly smoky, properly spelled whisky. A kilt, if it came to that.

He missed his gloomy mother. Together they called Louis the Infernal Optimist. He’d burn the house down looking for a bright side.