“Dr. Maschke swears by Buddhism,” my father said, and pulled a plastic bag out of his backpack, “letting go and all that. You should talk to him about Buddhism sometime, Luisa, I’m sure he’d like that.”

My father tipped the contents of the plastic bag onto Selma’s kitchen table. There were presents wrapped in Arabic newspapers. Selma unwrapped a light green sequined caftan.

“How very nice,” she said, and carefully pulled the shimmering caftan over her hairdo and down her long body. Her light brown orthopedic shoes peeked out from under the glittering material.

The optician received a jar of Tunisian honey and I got a saddlebag. “It’s real camel leather,” my father said.

“How practical,” the optician remarked.

My mother wasn’t there. Her gift lay unopened on the kitchen table.

That evening we sat on the front stoop. My father took up the whole bottom step, Alaska lay at his feet, and Selma, the optician, and I sat on the top step behind my father. My father smoked clove cigarettes, tilted his head back, and gazed at the stars. “Isn’t it amazing that you see the same stars no matter where you are in the world? Crazy, isn’t it?” he asked, and because it was a lovely thought, the optician swallowed the comment that this was not, strictly speaking, true.

Selma was not looking up at the stars but at my father’s head. She adjusted her glasses and leaned so far forward that her nose touched the tips of his hair. “You have lice,” she announced.

“Oh shit,” my father said.

“I still have a lice comb from the children somewhere,” Selma said, and went inside to look for the comb she had used to comb lice from Martin’s and my heads.

I gazed up into the sky with my father. “Have you been to Japan yet?” I asked.

“No,” he answered, “Japan doesn’t interest me so much. But Dr. Maschke swears by Buddhism.”

Selma came back with the lice comb, a bathing cap, and a plastic bottle. “I even found some lice shampoo,” she said.

“Is it still good?” the optician asked. “It’s at least fifteen years old.”

My father took the shampoo bottle out of Selma’s hand and looked it over. “There’s no expiration date,” he said.

“Well, then,” Selma said, and unscrewed the top, because she believed that anything without a listed expiration date can’t expire.

Selma massaged the shampoo into my father’s hair and combed it back. With his gleaming hair, he looked like Rock Hudson. He gazed back up at the stars. “It’s crazy,” he said.