For Dennis Hiatt

If she isn’t lying to me again, her apartment has been cleansed of the half-empty liquor bottles and couch junkies. All of her clothes are in neat stacks on the antique armoire, like they were before her trip into narcotics, and her drugstore perfumes are lined at the sink. This is the way her apartment was when she first moved in: clean and immaculate.

She called me this morning, voice high, tapping out an urgent message. "Daddy, I have to see you."

"Elaine? Why? What, baby? What’s wrong? Where are you?"

"I have an announcement!" she said. I was afraid to ask. I had visions of a Vegas wedding, the invisible jaws of HIV, or a proposed hitchhiking trip through East LA. "I have finally cleaned up," she said–then told me, with a twenty-four-year-old’s fragile pride, what she’d been doing. "Lets have dinner. Same time. Same place. Gotta go now, Daddy. Gotta get ready for the interviews."

Years ago, I helped her heft the heavy furniture up that staircase, to the second floor, where bay-windows encompassed a wide expanse of the lesser city and a tiny sliver of bay. The apartment was fine, but she lived in the flight path, so the rent was cheaper. A roar of airplanes constantly thundered overhead.

If Elaine isn’t lying, she has bathed within the last twenty-four hours, has inventoried her life and watered her plants, those dying ferns and cacti on the window ledge. Also, she has lined up interviews. Her kitchen has real food, not just condiments and the occasional rotting vegetation. I will know when I see her this evening. We’ll meet at the restaurant, where we always celebrate her renewed sobriety–three times in the last five years.

It’s Sunday. On Sunday, I spend my mornings reading the paper, smoking too many cigarettes and sipping coffee as I go through bills. On Sunday afternoons, I trek down to the used bookstores and, in the evenings, treat myself to a fabulous, solitary dinner. Her call puts my pattern on pause. I find myself staring at the table, watching the smoke undulate from a butt in the ashtray, and thinking.

I am afraid, I drank through her childhood, we lived in a three-bedroom apartment, and her mother was a cold woman. Elaine was our only child. We did not have central heating, or vacation in the Bahamas. We had bologna, a crippled dog, named Seth, and occasionally, a warm family dinner where none of us spoke.

Elaine was always observant. I remember one day, after the horrible fight that sent her mother packing, after leaving work early, after everything that mattered to me was lost or set adrift–I had collapsed on the living room floor and my feet hung out from under a blanket. I have horrible feet.

She noticed them sticking out, bluish and hairy–clodhopper feet. She brought me a blanket from her room and draped it over them. She was ten at the time. I looked up at her and saw a perfect human being. I didn’t stop drinking, but I remembered that small kindness and the pleasure on her face when I leaned up, out of my stupor, to thank her before passing out. When she was fifteen, she ran away.

Not long after, I found myself in detox and worked my way through it, like a slow ride through a car wash. My break with the liquor was slow. I often revisit those times. If I had only… If I had not… There are certain things an adult must not do. Examining an irretrievable past is one of them. I still imagine waking up one day to find that my life is thrillingly different.

The empty space of my bed is filled with someone warm and wonderful. I am not an accountant. I am a political pundit writer, or a surgeon or a businessman–someone with power. My daughter is away at a private school, or a flight academy, or a cheery yellow house with a husband that knows her birthday and her age.

But she is not. Now, she learns to type at an evening class and stay inside the box of regular employment, whereas before, she flaunted her beautiful, thin-teen’s body to a bunch of older men who would never love her. I do not know if she prostituted herself. It’s possible.

We began speaking again six years ago, five years after she’d vanished, omitting the dialogues that might have transpired years earlier and going right for the talk adults talk. There was no, "Daddy, today I learned how to paint my picture." There was only, "Daddy, today I’m in jail and you’ll have to bail me out. I don’t have anyone else’s number."

I made the trip to the jail, after years of no contact, to discover her. She twitched beside me. I said, "Don’t miss your court date!"

"I won’t," she replied, running off. I watched her maneuver through traffic, sifting through cars speeding across the main drag, like a deer on spindly legs. She had been arrested for robbery. There would be many lies and half-truths in the coming years.

If she is not lying, today, she has finally made progress. I remember a conversation two years ago, over the phone, where she said: "I am definitely cleaning up my act. I’ve got a good job and I don’t need anything. You don’t have to keep coming by, Daddy. Everything’s fine here!" I imagined her reformed, with her old, straight-arrow friends beside her, a happy glow on her face. I imagined her living like her mother always wanted her to, clean and savvy with a million social appointments.

I had believed her, and to surprise her, brought a bunch of Chinese take-out and a bouquet of Gerber daisies. I found her naked in her apartment, passed out, fresh track-marks on her arms, and a nameless, faceless guy passed out beside her. She had sold every appliance I had bought her.

Her body was beautiful, if not emaciated. She always had a delicate look about her. I stared. I had never seen her pubic hair before and was rather surprised to note it. In a father’s mind, a daughter never grows pubic hair–just stays in that innocent zone of daughter-land forever.

I stared at her xylophone ribs. She had her mother’s white, Irish skin. Her lips fell open and I watched her breathe, in and out, in and out. She was naked and beautiful on the couch I had given her on her twenty-first birthday. Cigarette burns had devastated the couch. Her hair was dyed platinum. Naturally it was reddish-brown. I did not wake her. I drove to the nearest bridge and looked into the San Francisco Bay. Of course, the railing had been safeguarded against jumps. Later that evening, I called her mother.

"Lis, we need to talk."

"Who is this?"

"Daniel."

"Oh. What did you want to talk about today, Daniel?" She sounded chilly, as she always did when I called to interrupt her new, happy life.

"Elaine."

"What about Elaine?"

"She’s doing drugs again."

"Daniel, I tried. I tried with her so many times. The last time she was here she stole a bunch of Eugene’s silverware. I’ve had it with her. Sorry."

"What do you mean, sorry?–She’s your damn daughter."

"She’s more a part of you than she ever was of me."

"Well, it’s a fine time to be mentioning that. I seem to recall that you were the one who walked out. You were the one–"

Lis’s line cut me off. Dial tone. There was nothing more. I imagined her applying that waxy lipstick in a full vanity mirror, magnifying her pores to assert her need for the latest cosmetic miracle–plastic kewpie doll. I imagined our daughter, cold as death, naked on a couch I had given her.

Today, in preparation, I tuck a dress shirt over my ever-expanding middle. I put on some Aspen cologne. I brush back my hair, graying at the temples. I say a prayer to the anonymous god who has guided me. I scratch my chest. If that god has a face, Elaine will meet me at the restaurant at the corner of 4^th and Elm. She will be wearing her greeting smile. She will have her arms open to embrace me because I am not perfect, but I am not "sorry" like her mother.

I get in my Volkswagen, flower-power, bug. The engine sputters. I arrive at the restaurant at exactly six p.m. She is not there.

I wait. All of my life feels like this same wait–stretched out over years and thickened at times like these to a dull throbbing of my head. My feet are cold. The restaurant has been air conditioned to an arctic temperature.

I feel ridiculous seated there, waiting with an expectant, pregnant look for a woman who is my daughter to saunter through the door. I watch many women who are not she, because, in one respect or another, they look like her. Some are made up. Some are too short, or too fat. Some have a man on their arms, and laugh, softly, at an intimate joke. They sigh in womanly ways.

The door whooshes open and shut, bells tinkling. The restaurant heats up from the crush of bodies rapidly filling the tables. I look up, and Elaine appears as if out of nowhere, like she always has. She has gained some weight, not a lot, enough to make her look human, and her hair is now purple, almost burgundy-auburn. She wears no cosmetics.

"Hi, daddy," she says. She wears a red, short-sleeve dress with white dots. I can see her arms plainly. The tracks now appear to be tiny, dark freckles. "How’s Seth?"

"On his last legs. How else? He’s been that way for years." I notice her pupils are normal.

"You look like shit," she says, glancing at the menu.

I want to tell her that it has been a long day, that a long day of hope is longer than the longest day of reality. I want to tell her as she sits there, looking healthier than normal, that my feet are getting warmer and warmer. I want to tell her all kinds of things, including how I hate her mother, but instead– I wait to hear her say more, then say, "Did you get a job today?"

She says, "Yes." She leans over and hugs my old body. Her embrace is a warm blanket in the coldness of my stooped posture. I hug her. I tighten my grip, as if loosening my hold will allow her to fly away. "I missed you," she says, through crushed lungs. "But, Daddy? Daddy, you have to let go sometime. You’re choking the air out of me."

From another table, I am sure we look like some old guy and his too young girlfriend–or some old guy and his beautiful, perfect daughter–or maybe, just some old guy who is sappily hugging a young girl in a delicate red dress like there will be no end to his greeting because it has been such a long time since he’s seen her, and she was gone to some nowhere-land on the far end of the continent, thought never to return.

I release her and she is still there, across from me, casually reading the menu, as if she has always come back to this moment, to me, battling through her life to meet me in mine. We continue to talk, omitting the hungry insecurities and the mention of what has come before. We wear the truth of our lives like scars on our different, but similar faces–scars that only we can see, stretching from the temple all the way around the head.

I don’t care. I am the older man hugging the young girl. She is the young girl, unaware of what this means.

"You need a girlfriend, Dad," she says. "You’d get out more."

"I’ve got you," I say. "What more do I need? You ashamed to be seen with your old man? I must not be handsome enough."

"Whatever," she says. "I just think you’ve been lonely lately. I mean, I’m fun and all–but…"

"You’re my little girl," I say. "That’s enough."

We are talking the talk adults talk: empty and frivolous at times. Beneath the guarded armor of our faces, a whole other conversation begins. Elaine smiles, twirling a striped straw between her fingers. Our waitress arrives, outside pedestrians pull their coats tighter to shield them from the stinging wind, and I exhale.

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