got his start. Eventually he owned another house, then a gas station. He was always a very good businessman.
        “At some point, Dad went back to Germany and brought Mom to the United States. She was good friends with the Resig family and he’d known her for years. Now that he had enough money to take care of a family, he went and got her and they got married.”
        “When was that, Ingrid?”
        “Oh, I guess it was in the twenties. The early twenties. Then you know where we lived on 33rd Street. Dad had bought that apartment building around 1922, I think.”
        Michael remembered the solidly built apartment building in downtown LA with its spacious front porches, enormous rooms, heavy sliding doors, dark woodwork, and musky odor. Ingrid had lived with her parents in one of the downstairs units, Michael’s grandparents Emil and Margaret in one of the upstairs, the other two rented out. The apartments, though large, had only one bedroom, so Ingrid never had her own bedroom growing up; only a Murphy-bed that pulled down from a heavy closet door. She talked briefly about the grammar school she attended in downtown LA, and the high school, Polytechnic. She told about how the families, her parents Max and Martha and Emil and Margaret, ate meals together, especially on Sundays, observing the European custom of eating the main meal at mid-day and a much smaller meal, supper, at six or seven in the evening.
        Then, as the story was gathering momentum, it unexpectedly ended. Michael was just getting interested. He had learned about Martha’s environment, where she was born, the circumstances of her coming to the United States, but nothing about Ingrid’s upbringing, her life with her mother, Martha’s personality or habits.
        Maybe sensing this, Ingrid made a half-hearted effort to flesh out the story: “She liked to sew. She was good at making little dolls. She made me a doll when I was young that I had until I left home for Germany.”
        And then the room was quiet, illuminated by soft light, some trucks outside working a construction site up the hill, and Ingrid sitting in bed across from him, ill with stage-four lung cancer, waiting to die, and looking fatigued.
        For the rest of the afternoon, they discussed this and that, little snippets of conversations about anything that came to mind, the upcoming elections, a nephew’s job interview. Several friends dropped by to visit. Then Michael left and came back with dinner. At about eight, they said good night, he returned to the house, phoned Deborah, and settled in for the night.

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        Sitting in the dark lanai, a drink in hand, he gazed over the