He thought – not for the first time – about the novelty of being ordered about by the same girl who had, at six months of age, been sick all over the shoulder of his totally irreplaceable 1958 Italian topcoat, the girl he’d once delighted by turning all her plastic play blocks into brightly colored lumbering beetles, the girl he’d tutored with indifferent results in the arcane discipline of sixth-form calculus. The woman who had turned to him on a cold and awful day for what support he could provide, who had said, Fass, help, I don’t know what to do. Humans lived so fast.
