I went with Mary to a party for her grandfather, the summer before our senior year. Someone asked him how he had lived to ninety and he said, “I outfoxed all my enemies!”

A bit later, after I’d been introduced and abandoned in the chair beside him, he said, “Never felt sorry for myself!” I wondered if I was supposed to tip him for these nuggets. He was a big man, broad across the chest, with a high forehead and still-good hair ration. “You’re not really ninety, are you.” He gave me a close look for the first time. “That’s not the way to ingratiate.”

Five years later, at our wedding, he looked the same, although whenever he was standing, he clasped his hands behind his back to hide the Parkinson’s. I’d like to think he was the one who caught the corsage when Mary threw it, but I don’t think that was the case.

Five years after that, pregnant with our first child, Mary went to see him and said we’d like to name the baby after him. “That’s not the way to ingratiate,” he said. By then, he was living in the latest facility Mary’s mother had found for him. The previous one had been closed down because of bacteria, and he’d been one of the few to make it out.

At his next birthday party, he refused to wear the pointy hat, and he ignored the younger women, all in their eighties at least, hovering around him in the social room. Someone asked—okay, it was me—“How did you make it to a hundred?”

“Never ate cake,” he said, spooning up some of his second slice, waiting for the shaking to ebb before bringing the piece to his mouth.