‘It makes me homesick, Jimmy, this flower, this smell,’ she said softly. ‘We have this flower very much at home, in the old country. It always grew in our yard and my papa had a green bench and a table under the bushes. In summer, when they were in bloom, he used to sit there with his friend that played the trombone. When I was little I used to go down there to hear them talk—beautiful talk, like what I never hear in this country.’
‘What did they talk about?’ I asked her.
She sighed and shook her head. ‘Oh, I don’t know! About music, and the woods, and about God, and when they were young.’ She turned to me suddenly and looked into my eyes. ‘You think, Jimmy, that maybe my father’s spirit can go back to those old places?’
I told her about the feeling of her father’s presence I had on tha
