On one bright Sunday, Rebecca arranged a simple dinner at her house.

Five plates sat on the table.

Clarence used his cane to reach the chair at the end and lowered himself into it with a satisfied sigh.

“I thought you might put me to work washing dishes,” he told her.

“Not today,” she said.

“You’re on storytelling duty.”

He told the children about his boyhood, about rationing during wartime, about learning to fix a bicycle with tools borrowed from a neighbor, and about meeting Abigail at a town dance.

He told them she had laughed when he stepped on her shoe, and that he had spent decades trying to make her laugh again.