When this meeting of the minds was over, I walked down the block to Gulf Stream Boulevard, across from the Bay, to get to my appointment with Ann.

I stepped through the inner door of Ann’s office and held out my ritual offering of coffee and biscotti. She looked up from her blue armchair, and I sat in its duplicate across from her as she removed the lid from the cup and dipped an almond biscotti into it. I took off my Cubs cap and placed it on my lap.

“Make me smile,” she said.

Ann is over eighty years old. I’m not sure how much over. I do know she doesn’t like it when people say she is “eighty years young.”

“I am by no stretch of the imagination young unless I have morphed into a tortoise. I’ve earned my years. It is the end of them I regret and not their number which I savor.”

She had said that to me once when I told her I wasn’t interested in growing old. Now she wanted a joke. For almost a year now, I had not only been responsible for refreshments but also for telling a joke. I do not smile. I do not laugh. When my wife Catherine was hit and killed by Victor Woo’s car, I had lost my ability to consider happiness. Ann worked to have me lose my hard-earned depression, and I struggled to hold onto it. A joke delivered was a concession. It took research on my part.

“ ‘I have of late, but wherefore know I not, lost all my mirth,’ ” I said. “ ‘This goodly frame seems to me a sterile promontory.’ ”

“Shakespeare,” she said.

“Yes, and Hair. Catherine liked Hair. We saw it four times.”

“You liked it?”

“No.”

“But you remember it.”

“Yes.”

“A joke, Fonesca. It is time to pay the toll.”

Ann was well groomed, wore colorful tailored dresses, and had her white hair neatly trimmed short. She always wore a necklace and a wide bracelet. She had dozens of baubles of jewelry either made by her husband, a long-retired investment broker, or chosen by them during one of their frequent travels all over the world.