When he woke the next day, his cold had turned into a horrible, wet, crusty thing that practically had his face glued to his pillow. Lester came in, took a good look at him, and came back with a quart of fresh orange juice, a pot of tea, and a stack of dry toast, along with a pack of cold pills. "Take *all* of this and then come down to the ride when you're ready. I'll hold down the fort for another couple days if that's what it takes." Perry spent the day in his bathrobe, shuttling between the living room and the sun-chairs on the patio, letting the heat bake some of the snot out of his head. Lester's kindness and his cold made him nostalgic for his youth, when his father doted on his illnesses. Perry's father was a little man. Perry -- no giant himself -- was taller than the old man by the time he turned 13. His father had always reminded him of some clever furry animal, a raccoon or badger. He had tiny hands and his movements were small and precise and careful. They were mostly cordial and friendly, but distant. His father worked as a CAD/CAM manager in a machine shop, though he'd started out his career as a plain old machinist. Of all the machinists he'd started with at the shop, only he had weathered the transition to the new computerized devices. The others had all lost their jobs or taken early retirement or just quit, but his father had taken to CAD/CAM with total abandon, losing himself in the screens and staggering home bleary after ten or fifteen hours in front of the screen. But that all changed when Perry took ill. Perry's father loved to play nurse. He'd book off from work and stay home, ferrying up gallons of tea and beef broth, flat ginger-ale and dry toast, cold tablets and cough syrup. He'd open the windows when it was warm and then run around the house shutting them at the first sign of a cool breeze. Best of all was what his father would do when Perry got restless: he and Perry would go down to the living-room, where the upright piano stood. It had been Perry's grandfather's, and the old man -- who'd died before Perry was born -- had been a jazz pianist who'd played sessions with everyone from Cab Calloway to Duke Ellington. "You ready, P?" his father would ask. Perry always nodded, watching his father sit down at the bench and try a few notes. Then his father would play, tinkling and then pounding, running up and down the keyboard in an improvised jazz recital that could go for hours, sometimes only ending once Perry's mom came home from work at the framing shop. Nothing in Perry's life since had the power to capture him the way his father's music did. His fingers danced, literally *danced* on the keys, walking up and down them like a pair of high-kicking legs, making little comedy movements. The little stubby fingers with their tufts of hair on the knuckles, like goat's legs, nimbly prancing and turning.