My Doctor Said Stay in Bed. I Was Already on the Pacific Coast Highway. When I Got to the House I’d Built for My Parents’ Anniversary, My Brother-in-Law Was Evicting Them. I Laughed in His Face and Said: “You Have Exactly One Hour to Leave.”

“Come back tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll make breakfast.”

The anniversary party was two days later.

Fifty guests, most of them people my parents had known for decades, friends from the neighborhood where I had grown up and colleagues from my father’s years of work and women my mother had cooked for and laughed with and called at two in the morning when things continue reading …