Just the day before, I’d casually mentioned that maybe Jane would like to take my ticket. It was a reaction to news that she was planning to visit him in the Idaho mountain town where he spends vacations and where the conference was, and my fear that he would have no way to entertain her.

It wasn’t like they could cycle the bike path, not with his numb foot (neuropathy from degenerating discs). No. If my father was going to woo a gal, I wanted it to go well. A writing confab doesn’t require steady stepping and would put them on equal footing — two brilliant bookworms.

My proposal didn’t feel like a betrayal to my mother, more like we were in on the scheming together. My father is the kind of widower for whom procuring his lunchtime turkey sandwich is a significant victory. Whenever my mother prepared to leave town without him, she all but poured his breakfast Cheerios. Their union had distinct roles, and they both thrived in them. She wasn’t supposed to die first. My father was. And my mother — tough, independent, social — would be solid alone.

Then, in May, the mojitos. My father and Jane were headed to my brother’s house in Philadelphia for a first meeting. “Dad says, ‘Don’t worry about getting wine because, well, I’m not really drinking wine,’” my brother said. “I’m like, ‘Dad, you’re going on the wagon?’ And he says, ‘No, but I’m mostly drinking mojitos. I mean, we’re drinking mojitos.’”

My brother and I burst out laughing. Sure enough, Jane and my father mixed like pros, with her measuring the rum and him squeezing the limes.

I figured out about Jane in three days flat. My father and I talked most days after work, timed for his dreaded lonely return to his apartment after dinner out. He was on an exhausting, six-nights-a-week looping dinner circuit through a roster of couples (God bless them). The invites were both relief and curse. He hated eating alone, but being a third-wheel stunk.