[Characters in books get one description only, as if there’s a starting point and then the changes inflicted by the plot. But in life, we’re continuously taking stock of the people we know, describing them afresh, to see if we’ve understood something new. So maybe a character description should be left for the end of a book, a final sum-up. Ecce Mommy—she can’t be “Mommy”—I have to call her “my mother,” or my wife will think I’m a baby. The task in describing someone real, someone you know: there’s so much to synthesize, year in and year out, endless discovery, fragments, I see a bit of who my mother is, with each passing month, the eye thaws a little, sees a little more, discovers moles, a twitching eyelid, a certain motion to the hip … Barbara, for instance, unnerved me when she pointed out that Gionata gestured just like his grandmother, and this felt like a conspiracy, not the detail per se, but that I’d never noticed before, the way someone might feel detecting an airplane contrail up in the blue sky, suspicious they might be spreading mind-controlling substances.]

After dinner we sit in front of the turned-off TV set; we’re on two couches arranged in an L, my father and I on one couch together. My mother has her iPad beside her and my father, a mini in his lap. I ask him about his leg: rehabilitation’s good, physical therapy’s a trip, perfect for someone his age, he’s always wanted to do it, he says, every day, some new method to get more out of life: “I’m very pleased.”

I tell my mother: “I’ve got two tickets to the Auditorium, to something I’m sure you’d like, about the Gospel.”

“Oh, wonderful, if I don’t have to help out over there. If Luca and the nanny say I can, with Daniela away … I said I was available, so I have to be around.”

I update them on Irene: she’s doing great, she and Barbara just love each other, and I also got to see Daniela in Milan, an agent’s interested in her novel, he’s a good agent, I know him, not bad, huh, who’d have thought … (No, she didn’t ask me to read it.)

“It’s really thrilling,” my mother says, “so unexpected, really, she’s very brave to challenge herself like that, at her age.” Then, we’re onto another topic, politics, and they both start in with, “Of course that’s not what you do … all of a sudden … being so unavailable…”

“Well, it’s not like Luca’s working.”

“Still, the babies are used to a different routine.”

“Yeah,” I say, “but for Daniela, it was tragic having twins—she needed to think about something else for a change.”

“What do you mean, tragic,” Mom says in her usual voice, never letting anything past her: “A gift from God—you’re saying a gift from God is tragic?” She asks this calmly, not dramatically, like she wants my opinion on a theological question.