I looked at the room. At the tables, the other people in them — the quiet afternoon business of a tea room that had been holding significant endings and ordinary afternoons with equal accommodation for decades.
"How old were you?" I said.
"The first time? Seven. My parents had just— " He paused. Found the word. "Separated. Permanently. He brought me here. We had tea and something from the kitchen and he told me about his own father's death, which had happened when he was six, and what that had been like, and how he had gone on." He picked up his cup. "He was not a sentimental man. But he understood proportion."
"He sounds like you," I said.
"I sound like him," he said. "There's a direction to that."
I held my cup. The warmth of it. The room around us, doing its quiet and unhurried thi
