“No, no, the last thing I need is somewhere else to go.”

“Well, in that case, maybe we could start letting my sister-in-law write there, too, you could meet her there, give her some brilliant advice on writing, she’ll fall in love with you…” I stirred the gin with the chopstick, told him to take out the two chilled glasses, white now with condensation. I cut off some lemon rind and rubbed it along the rims of the glasses; I poured in the cold, diluted gin.

“Maybe I really should do something nuts like that—go after your sister-in-law. Would you kick my ass?”

“Cheers.”

“Happy birthday, my friend.” He set his glass on the counter and hugged me.

I could feel his big, warm body, and about a third of my martini sloshed onto the floor.

Afterward, he was drying the floor with some paper towels, almost the entire roll spread out, leading to the fridge, and I joked: “Better you, anyway, than my brother. But the children! The kiddies! What about the children!”

“See? One wrong move, you ruin somebody’s life.”

The girls knocked on the window by the porch swing where they were sitting and gestured that they wanted a drink: I downed mine in one gulp and started making more.

Two hours later, Francesco and I were slurring our words, and we’d both turned morose. Barbara and Giò got up from the couch (I was lying on the floor), and said we were incredibly boring, so they were heading to the bar now, to wait for our toast at midnight. It was only ten.

As soon as we were by ourselves, Francesco said: “It’s very simple: I don’t have a family and I don’t have a job.”

Just then, I realized that my mother would be turning seventy that summer, because I was turning forty, and we had always turned the same number, thirty years apart, every single year. And how bewildered is any womb-born creature / that has to fly.

My mother was the oldest of five, very attached to her father, an engineer for the Enel Group. She was born in Terni, spent her childhood between Genoa and Milan, and then in the early sixties, moved to Rome when she was beginning high school—too late to adapt—she never learned to start her words with double consonants.

Even when she was little, she considered herself a leader in any group: she made the other kids sing and play, children, friends on the beach, on vacations in Liguria. One boy, a dear friend, died of TB, I think. The other day she told me: “It’s true, I practically didn’t have a childhood. I lived in a city where I didn’t grow up, and I grew up all over the place.”

She was her father’s favorite, the only one who truly seemed to be his, both of them: abstract, moral, elusive, playful, silly, tall, childish.