He places a clothespin between his thick lips and turns back to the careful work of pinning my clothes and letting out the line. His shoulders are covered with the sunspots that come with age, but his arms are thick and muscular. He wears no wedding ring.

“Listen,” I say in a low voice, though he is already listening. “I don’t know who you are, but you can’t just go letting yourself into people’s apartments and invading their privacy.”

He puts down the clothes and removes the pin from his mouth. “Have I invaded your privacy?”

“You’re going through my underwear!”

“And you think they interest me?”

Now the heat rushes to my face. The pair of purple underwear that was in his hands a moment ago is old and childish, the elastic stretched out.

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“So what are you saying? You don’t want me to do your laundry? Next time I won’t.” He pins the last shirt and turns away from the window. “There’s ice cream in the refrigerator. I’m going out and I won’t be back until late. There’s no need to wait up for me; I have the key. In case you have nowhere to go, there’s a good movie on at nine.”

Why do I watch the movie? I eat the ice cream and watch the movie, just as he suggested. The movie isn’t half bad, it’s true, but I fall asleep anyway, and when I wake up something else is on. It’s past midnight. I put my father’s watch to my ear. It will go on ticking for only so long, and soon the surplus of time he left for me will be spent. But for now it goes on ticking.

Somewhere there is a cat crying, or maybe a baby. I run the water for a bath and, lying back, I notice for the first time a dark water stain on the ceiling where the plaster has begun to peel from a leak. Before I go to bed, I knock on the door of the tiny back bedroom, although I know he isn’t there: I would have heard him come in. I flip the light switch. The narrow bed is as neatly made as a soldier’s. He seems too big for such a bed—my bed, it suddenly occurs to me, the one my father meant for me to sleep in if I’d ever come to visit. But I had not visited, and so in the meantime the small bed had been loaned out to a stranger.

There is a wooden dresser at the foot of the bed, the only other piece of furniture that fits in the room. Opening the top drawer, I find a shaving kit, toothbrush, and a change of underwear. The others are empty.

In my father’s bedroom, I take out the small leather photo album I found in the drawer of his night table. In the apartment where I grew up, the only photographs my father kept were of me, and now, since I found the little album a week ago, I can’t stop looking at it. On the first page is a picture of him as a young man, even younger than I am now. He wears shorts and hiking boots, and stands in front of the rock wall of a canyon. It’s uncanny how much the face in the photo looks like mine. Though we always shared a resemblance, it was muted by the difference in our ages. But in this picture it’s easy to see how it happens—how one nose gets passed down through time; one set of ears that stick out a little too much; one eye that is just the tiniest bit smaller than the other, as if to hold itself back from seeing. Even our postures are similar, as if we were born, one after the other, to occupy the same spot.