“He wouldn’t have had all the aggravation?” Parr said. “You want to talk aggravation, try living with two teenagers for any given week, much less the six or eight years it actually takes.”

“Seven,” Mickey said without missing a beat.

Parr turned on him. “Seven what?”

“Seven years. People are teenagers for seven years.”

“If you want to grant that teenagers are people at all and not an entirely different species. And where do you get seven?”

Mickey held up fingers as he counted. “Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Seven.”

Parr turned to Hunt. “The boy is such a literalist.”

“I’ve noticed,” Hunt said.

Astonishingly, the warm weather was holding. After the dinner and its attendant accolades for the chef, Mickey suggested they take his bottle of homemade limoncello up to the roof, where there was a mellow dim light from a Japanese lantern, more room, a better view, and more comfortable chairs than the kitchen benches. So the three males walked up the outdoor stairway and out onto the deck that got used on every single one of the nineteen days a year that the nights were pleasant.

Everybody had helped bus the table, but at her insistence, Tamara stayed down to wash the dishes-she’d be up soon. So after they all got seated, Hunt checked behind him to make sure she was not coming up the stairs, then leaned in over the round deck table. “Is she seeing a doctor?”

Mickey shook his head. “No. She won’t do that.”

“Why not? How much has she lost?”

“At least twenty pounds, though she says less.”

At this, Parr coughed. “That much? Are you sure about that?”

Mickey nodded. “I asked her yesterday. She said eighteen, maybe more, so I’m thinking probably twenty or twenty-five.”