And the man I was calling Sebastian corrected me without even seeming to notice he was doing it.

“No,” he said, half-laughing, “the tampiquena.

I always got the tampiquena, you’re thinking of” and then he stopped, because he had once again answered as a husband and not as a brother-in-law, and there was no story that covered a dead man’s standing order.

The worst of them came from Camila, who knew nothing of any of it.

One afternoon she climbed up and pulled an old toy watch down from the very top shelf of a hall closet, a plastic thing she had lost years before.

“Daddy Sebastian found it for me,” she told me, delighted, holding it up.