“Hi Daddy,” by Matthew Klam

My daughter was going on a trip to Europe that she'd been dreaming about for a year and planning for months, with the boyfriend she'd dumped and then got back together with a few weeks earlier. Lucas was already over there with two friends, and as we drove to the airport I had the feeling that her flying alone across the dark, empty ocean was practice for her real departure, to college, a month from now.

There was the sound of us not speaking as I drove, then the stiff, formal quiet of me keeping out of Leah's way as we parked and she hefted her backpack, twenty-eight pounds of teen-age clothing, and followed me into the Dulles terminal and up the stairs to the atrium, with its soaring cement columns and a beautiful pink sunset with mythic clouds on the other side of the tall glass walls. "Watch my stuff," she said, and went to the counter. The airport was empty, as if she had some power to wipe out anyone who might try to stop her. Leah wore loose, soft clothing, and a bucket hat pulled down on her head. She was competent and smooth. She came back and gave me a shoulder hug and said, "O.K., pal," and lifted her backpack. "Thanks for the nice ride. I love you and I'll see you later."

I asked her if she had her phone all charged. She said she did.

I watched her go through security. As she went by, she flashed a peace sign—at me or maybe at the Amish-looking woman beside me, in a starched cap and timeless flowered dress, black socks and sneakers—and some portal opened into her future, while I was recorded and preserved, folded into history.

Lucas had been sending updates for the past week as he and his friends met up with another group of boys in Bilbao. They were sick from clubbing until 7 a.m., and somebody had broken a piece of furniture so they'd been evicted from their hostel and had to sleep in a train station. He was glad to be splitting off from the others for the next part of the trip. Leah had shown me a photo from a beach on the northwestern coast of Spain, an intimate closeup of a boy, camera aimed up his nose, while another boy leaned in—this was Lucas—mouth open, tongue and teeth glistening.

"Are they bald?"

"They bald," she said. For some reason, they had shaved their heads.

I hit traffic getting out of the airport, and the inexact designations of the Beltway confused me, north and south, inner and outer, even though I'd been driving here for twenty-four years. I'd been a little off lately, with strange things going on in my mind and body, and didn't want to get lost at night on a highway in suburban Virginia. I'd had Covid, after dodging it for years, and there were these lingering effects, and at times it was hard to know whether it was that or this—my kid was leaving, and I was stunned, in a perpetual state of shock, and couldn't catch up with reality. My mind looped through the images: her first night home from the hospital; sleepaway camp; tumbling passes and shoulder injuries; how she'd stood in a field, listening to the bloodcurdling screech of a fox. Ninth-grade math; spots on her face; mean girls; test prep; her infected nose ring; the boy she fooled around with in the bottom of a rowboat; the Olaplex hair tonic to repair damaged hair; college applications; the personal essay; White Claw; Lucas; prom.

At home, I saw Leah's hair ties and her favorite little cookies and her stupid sheepskin slippers, and opened the fridge and put away the oat milk she'd left on the counter. Before taking her to the airport, I'd made her this elaborate dinner, and the kitchen was still a wreck. What was I doing? I wasn't here for myself. I wasn't here as myself. I was here for her, and she wasn't here. I blew my nose on a paper towel and felt that flip-flopping in my chest, as if I were excited or something, and went to press the button on my heart monitor, but I'd already mailed it back to the doctor so he could read the data.

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I'd been fine, really, and got good at functioning around it, whatever it was—arrhythmia, stomach pains, coughing my brains out in the shower, sneaking away to pass out like someone who'd crawled through the jungle on his hands and knees. A nutritionist had prescribed five hundred dollars' worth of herbs and vitamins, and every morning I swallowed them, and they got stuck in my throat and stayed there, which felt more or less like a heart attack.

On the counter was a tray of delicate little basil and tomato plants, a box of light bulbs, and a three-litre can of my mother's favorite olive oil: these things were for her. She and my father lived an hour away, and needed all the love in the world right now, but, if I was going to make the drive, I'd have to trick myself into doing it, so I texted my mother to say that I'd be there in the morning. She called back, but I let it go to voice mail. I knew what she'd say. My father was scared of dying, and my mother was scared of how much his dying would cost.

And now she'd be counting down the minutes until I appeared in her driveway.

In the meantime, she'd be worrying about her back, and the ironing board falling out of the closet and knocking her unconscious, and who would take care of him then. She didn't want anyone coming in, and she wasn't going to send him anywhere. His mind and body were mostly gone, but she wanted him to be at home for as long as possible, though she had no help lifting or moving him. This had been going on for almost a year; she was eighty-two, and hanging in there.

Marla was at a conference in Bloomington, Indiana, of all places, receiving her usual accolades in the difficult, sometimes hopeless field of juvenile-justice reform, navigating between the federal government and various state, local, and tribal organizations. When I'd asked about the conference, she'd used words like "allocating," "outsourcing," and "prosecutorial restraint." She'd been in a low-grade panic since we'd got a response to our FAFSA financial-aid form saying that we wouldn't receive any help with Leah's college tuition, and had been trying as hard as possible to make an extra quarter of a million dollars. She'd FaceTimed that morning while eating breakfast in her hotel room, hoping to talk to Leah, who was still asleep. Marla had looked worried, overwhelmed by a big pink sweater, with an age spot on her face that I'd never noticed before and bags under her eyes like Benicio Del Toro's. She'd called to give us a list of final preparations, although we'd already done everything. I had all the details of Leah's ten-day trip, had gone over dates and times with Lucas's parents, the Lazzarones, had spoken to Leah about pickpockets and heatstroke, and given her suggestions of cathedrals to visit, which she'd ignored. Leah had saved up to pay her own airfare to Spain, but we'd paid for a hotel room near the beach in Málaga, and a hop by plane from Seville to Barcelona.

I texted Marla to say that I was back from the airport and she could call if she wanted to hear about the drop-off, but she wrote that she was in some plenary talk and needed to pay attention, and, anyway, she'd been on the phone with Leah while she was waiting to board.

"Oh good," I texted back.

Marla texted a heart.

I texted a smiley face.

"She said you tried to run someone over in the parking lot."

"I was kidding around."

Marla was typing.

"She's going to be fine. We'll miss her but we'll manage."

Marla was typing again.

"She was anxious and we talked about similar situations she'd been in, how she settled into kindergarten when she realized that other kids were scared, too."

She kept typing.

"I told her how I waited outside her classroom for the whole first week, watching her through the door, and she said, Mommy, I know. I could see her at that little plastic stove stirring something with a magic wand."

Marla was still typing. It was hard to overstate how attentive, professional, and educated she was—she had a master's in psych and a law degree from Fordham—or how disgustingly intentional and engaged she'd been in Leah's emotional and psychological development.

"Before she got on the plane I told her, We will always love you and this will always be your home. This house and the ground around it and the air above it, with the tree outside your window, the sun coming through it. It will come back to you in dreams forever."

What the fuck.

"Ha ha. I'm sure you have your own version of how things went for her in kindergarten."

"I remember being in Ohio watching John Kerry lose the election, and you telling me you were pregnant, and then nothing until Leah's birthday with the bouncy house," I texted.

"Third grade. You tend to forget things that make you emotional."

"I guess."

"Which makes her feel weird, and she doesn't know what to do with you. She's a teen-ager. She lives in the moment."

I said I'd try to live in the moment, too. I wondered whether Leah actually needed any insight into my feelings. Like maybe she just needed to have her own feelings, in my presence. Like maybe all a young person needed was some kind of space, independent of her parents, to assemble and prepare herself for the life ahead. "To be alone in the presence of another," or whatever the saying was.

I thought back to four months earlier, when Leah and I had gone for a walk in the woods. She was angry that it was hot, and complained that the woods smelled like sewage. She listed the pros and cons of the schools that had accepted her, and then for no sane reason decided that she was moving to the Pacific Northwest for the next four years, rather than a pretty good place fifty or even a hundred and fifty miles away. I maintained my commitment to being a blank slate for her to draw her thoughts on, dadlike, stoic and steady, but as the trail wound through the forest I thought I was about to throw up or do something out the other end. I was praying that I'd make it back to the car, and when we got home I was, in fact, quite ill, overcome with these somaticized issues related to who knows what. Then I cooked us a healthy dinner, and sat at the table pretending to eat, while she went through the whole thing again with Marla. The simple act of eating—that vital and necessary process of digestion which I'd done all my life with the spirited gusto of a goat in a junk yard swallowing tin cans and plastic bags—had been problematic since Covid, and I sat there with a sharp pain in my stomach, debilitating exhaustion, and a fear that this thing was knitted permanently into my nerves.

Marla was typing. "She's in love for the first time in her life and flying to a beach on the Mediterranean and it's exciting and romantic. Think of all the joy we'll be gaining from her experiences!"

"Absolutely."

Marla's work focussed on helping adolescents in conflict as they processed their emotions and instructing them on how to deal in a diplomatic way with external power dynamics. As the years passed and Leah lost interest in gymnastics, volleyball, and playing soccer in the mud, Marla had led the way, teaching her what it meant to be a woman out in the world, how to work through disagreements with friends, how to make her eyelashes look longer, what boys want and how they'll roofie you and rape you and throw you in a ditch, how to apply concealer, how to make salad.

At the same time, my role had become more clearly defined and circumscribed. I drove the car, took her to doctors, did grocery runs. I was the better cook, and so, in one of those charming reversals that men experience these days, I was complimented for my cooking and how much more attractive I was since I'd lost weight but not for what I thought or what I said. I tried not to say much, to keep my voice down, tried not to loom over someone while complaining about the environmental cost of cloud storage, not to laugh sarcastically when someone lost their phone, not to go around the house in a bathrobe.

A few days a week, I did comms for an organization that provided funding for the humanities in developing countries. I oversaw the disparate pieces of our annual report, and punched up speeches for senior leadership, stripping out acronyms, making them sound human. Marla's work was more difficult, and more urgent—reading court testimony, fighting to protect children who'd been tried as adults in the criminal-justice system, engaging with their families—and in her downtime she liked to watch videos of crippled dogs being rehabilitated in Mexico, but her weekends with Leah were usually fun. After breakfast, they'd head out to their exercise class, then go to lunch and buy lotions. Meanwhile, I'd act like the greatest troop leader for a fun group of boys, going for a hike or a run, except that it was just me alone, doing things by myself.

As the clock ran down toward Leah's departure, she and Marla got closer. They shared clothes, and split entrées at restaurants, and at bedtime had long talks in the dark in Leah's room. They'd spent hours discussing the contents of the backpack she took to Spain, turning quiet and calm and anxious together. Marla was mulling over what she'd do with herself this fall after Leah had gone—maybe take banjo lessons, or learn to solder so she could make her own jewelry, or volunteer for this program where you get to hold opioid babies. Or we could move to the Pacific Northwest—like who's to stop us?—or maybe Marla would move there alone.

When we finished texting, I sat on the couch, watching Leah's flight on a tracking app, off the coast of Nova Scotia. It passed over St. John, then crossed Newfoundland, moving five hundred and sixty miles an hour, until there was nothing but ocean between her and Lisbon.

My alarm went off at five, so that I could see if she'd landed and would make her connecting flight, and I got up after that. I'd been up and down all night, wandering around, staring at board games stacked on a shelf in the hall or at the shag rug in our bedroom, endlessly bleeding nostalgia. I left early, glad to get out of the house, and didn't stop for coffee, and forgot to bring the dog so she could run around. My parents lived in the middle of nowhere, and as I got closer I saw trees damaged by a recent storm. My car hit the gravel of the driveway and I pulled up to their house, reminding myself to be nice.

The front door opened onto the old part of the house—low ceiling, pine floors, stone hearth, framed photos of grandkids—which I passed through into the new part, open, airy, sunny, painted white, with sliding glass doors, high ceilings, hanging plants, funky smells, and dust everywhere. My mother yelled hello from upstairs.

I found my dad at the table reading the newspaper, pretending to, and having breakfast. I kissed his cheek and it startled him. I felt the soft, smooth skin he shaved with his loud electric razor, his warm pink face. I sat and saw the watery, hazel-colored eyes behind his glasses, reflecting turmoil and disbelief. The area around his lower eyelids was especially troubling.

I hadn't seen him since two weeks earlier, when he'd fallen and hit his head. The blood had pooled around him as he lay there, and my mother couldn't get him up, so paramedics had to come. He still had the staples in and wore a hat to hide them. He was ashamed of his unwashed hair, and of his red-rimmed eyes, and wore some seven-dollar magnifying readers—six with his veteran's discount—that made it almost impossible for him to see. His T-shirt, which had been clean that morning but no longer was, had been sent from Tokyo by my sister. It said "I'm Big in Japan," which my brother-in-law really was, as a jazz pianist. My father also wore around his waist a wide cloth belt with magnets inside it, ostensibly for his lower back, but the Velcro had failed, so he held it together with a potato-chip-bag clip.

He gave me a long, funny look, because he thought he knew me from somewhere—158th Street in Harlem, where he'd lived with his parents and his crazy aunt and the heater that leaked carbon monoxide.

"I'm too young," I said. "I'm your son." I was familiar with this line of questioning, and we went around like that a few times, but he thought I was lying.

I pictured the round-faced, red-haired boy he'd been, out on the fire escape with Johnny Passerelli, and the plaid Woolrich coat he wore in the blizzard of 1950-something. There'd been gangs, and some kid had stabbed Johnny, and my father had had to switch schools, whatever.

My mother came downstairs and screamed my name at him and went into the kitchen. For the past couple of months, my father had been calling me different things. He ignored her. He couldn't hear anyway. The phone rang, and my mother answered. It was my aunt. My father had something to tell me.

"I fell."

"I know. I brought you home from the hospital."

"I'm not the same guy."

"Sure you are."

He started to tell me again but got distracted, chewing. He was like a zombie who ate Cheerios. He already had the most cereal and milk you could have on yourself without bathing in it. As I watched him, a terrible energy, that menacing strength he'd had all his life, coursed through me. I could imagine things: dropping him like a stone to the bottom of the ocean, or lifting him gently and carrying him to bed. My desperation to please him—or my need to get along with him, or to get away from him—had formed me, but now I was in charge. Then again, maybe I wasn't, because he'd forgotten me—me, but not my sisters. It became hard to think. I felt buzzy with this new feeling.

Twenty years ago, my parents had sold the house I grew up in, in suburban D.C., and moved out here. There were nice towns, with rich people and summer music festivals and hip distilleries and rolling farms with fancy stables and pretty fencing. This wasn't one of them. It felt generationally unchosen, with a sad main street and too much slate in the ground for good farming but not enough to quarry and mine. And yet their place was beautiful, and sometimes fifteen degrees cooler than the city, with a nice view, and wildflowers and songbirds, and a lush, comfortable darkness to sleep in at night, a good breeze, no mosquitoes, a spring-fed pond that felt silky and cool, and a little brook that wandered through the woods and snaked behind their house, and made rippling sounds that you could hear while lying in bed with the window open.

Leah loved this place, and loved to visit these people I neglected and had mostly abandoned because they were not as important to me as she was. I tried to come here as little as possible. I liked to pretend I'd had parents only casually, and didn't want to be reminded of how hard I'd clung to them for so long. I was a terrible son.

The window in front of us looked out on the hill that descended to the pond. As my father continued to eat his breakfast, a strange reddish-colored horse appeared outside, dragging a cinder block on a lead line across the driveway.

"Whose horse is that?"

"It's the girl's," my mother yelled from the other room, still on the phone.

The horse came closer, stepping daintily, carefully, into the flower bed by the dogwood tree. With his pinkish nose, he nuzzled the bird feeder, tipping it so that the whole sleeve of black thistle poured into his mouth.

"Goddammit!" my father said.

My mother went outside still holding the phone, and told the horse to get out of there. Then she came in, looking for more birdseed, and went back out.

When I was growing up, we always had animals. Who could forget Gladys the bloodhound, who jumped like a kangaroo and ate a meat loaf off the back of the stove, or the teacup Yorkie that loved to hump its squeaky pig. Sometimes now I lost track of the names of the dogs my parents let spit all over the windows and the cats who were bloodied in fights with raccoons, or the goat who got loose and drowned in the neighbor's pool. We also had rabbits, hamsters, infestations of mice, and, for some years, despite my father's effort to ascend the classes, a dozen or so chickens who'd come clucking into the house through the dog door, from the back-yard chicken coop. They crowed at dawn, inciting neighbors' complaints, until rats or foxes picked them off. After my father retired, my parents moved here so that he could finally keep horses and become the gentleman farmer he'd dreamed of being, but it was so much work, and then they got too old to ride and gave the horses away.

My mother came back in and I got up and hugged her. She looked tired but the same.

"I have your plants."

"O.K."

"I can leave them for you to deal with, or I can take them out back and put them in the ground. It's up to you."

She seemed to be considering the options. "Why don't you take them out back and shove them up your ass?"

My mother had a wonderful sense of humor, and had in fact just sent me a birthday check for a hundred dollars with a card inscribed to "Marvin," one of the names my father had recently come up with for me; then she'd crossed "Marvin" out and written "Garvin, or whatever your name is," and wished me a good year. She was beautiful, with only a few gray strands in her thick dark hair.

"How's life?"

"O.K.," she said. "I'm ready for it to be over."

She made coffee. I made toast. The phone rang, my other aunt calling, and I listened to my mother describe my arrival, the horse, me eating toast now, and how I liked it. My father was doing things with the food in his mouth and we tried not to look, but it was impossible. He said something then, and she had to translate, "Help me up!," waving her hand as a commentary on his imperiousness, or maybe to make sure I did it. His voice had changed and fallen back into his throat like Frankenstein's, and he didn't say "please" anymore, and treated whoever was there like a disobedient servant. He was the same as he'd always been—selfish and angry—but he was acting this way while dying.

I lifted him to his feet, which somehow seemed ridiculous to him, and he gave me a devilish chuckle. I held his hand as we walked to the stairs, my mother narrating for my aunt. At the bottom he started nervously counting, then took the first step and went up slowly, resting in the middle, shaking and panting, and I had to tell myself that this was real. He wasn't faking it. Here was this wreck of a human being, and yet everything else was normal. I'd seen this kind of thing in movies and read about it in books. At the top of the stairs, trembling, he told me he didn't need my help anymore, as I helped him undress and get into bed. He closed his eyes, and I watched him lying there, and thought he might die right then. He looked like Yoda at the end, or E.T. in the riverbed, that little guy so far from home.

He died a few weeks later.

We had a memorial service at the Hindu meditation center my parents used to belong to on Western Avenue, which shared a sanctuary with a kooky Unitarian church. His business partner spoke about how he used to wear work boots to the office, and my oldest sister told stories about someone I didn't recognize, and got her facts wrong, and her husband, the jazz guy, wore a Canali suit and paid for the reception.

The next day we hiked out to a trail my father loved, and dumped his ashes in the Potomac. My mother hiked with us, and I was glad that she was all there, still strong. Some months later, at Thanksgiving, I watched her haul a twenty-four-pound turkey out of the oven with a grunt and bang it onto the stove while my beefy nephew stood next to her, asking where she kept the club soda.

My father was maybe not ideally suited to raise children, but he saw that as more of a problem for us than for him. I think he was the kind of father they had back then, and maybe I was the kind we had now. There were things you could say about him and you could say the opposite and it would also be true. He could be infinitely patient, untangling your fishing line over and over, and never complaining. More than once, he'd used pliers to calmly remove a hook that I'd accidentally planted in his arm or leg while casting my line. And he spent hours in his woodshop, planing the cherry planks he used to build the kitchen. But if he ever got stuck doing a job he didn't want to do, which happens quite often in life, especially when you're raising four kids, he'd fly into a demented rage, which was terrifying and spoiled everything.

When we came to visit when Leah was small, as soon as we walked in he would drop down to the rug, singing and clapping or petting the dog so that she'd join him. And in his magnetic and self-effacing way he'd draw her to him, a seemingly gentle patriarch. If she showed up with a friend he'd be annoyed, and would not recover, would be sour and put-upon in a familiar way. He'd need me to dump a wheelbarrow full of bricks in the woods, or he'd ask me to join him in a repair I wasn't qualified for, holding a wrench on some pipe under the moldy sink, wasting the day, him standing over me offering inexpert advice, and at some point, without having fixed anything, I'd walk away. I'd given him a grandchild, enough already.

He was eighty-three when he died, and I was surprised that he'd made it that long. He didn't believe in drinking water, and had lived for a good part of his life on burnt hot dogs and Triscuits. He didn't think you had to wash cooking pots after you used them. He didn't believe in recycling, thought it was some left-wing conspiracy. He didn't really believe in death, either, and had refused to attend any of his friends' funerals. He liked to challenge himself with Sisyphean outdoor labors involving his beloved chainsaws, or with other acts of male fortitude, like taking something out of the refrigerator, scraping off the mold, and eating it, while yelling at anyone who was afraid to try it. He'd be remembered for the good deeds he'd done for the community—county co-chair for the Special Olympics, and two whole days a week volunteering at the local elementary school. It was my mother who had made me out of nothing, but my father had made the world, the birds and the trees, and had named them for me: the goldfinch and the evening grosbeak, the American hornbeam and the copper beech. He loved Leontyne Price singing "Knoxville: Summer of 1915." He loved his smelly truck. The last time he'd climbed behind the wheel, he'd driven into the back of the garage. "It's fine," my mother had said. "Let him." She said this nicely, like a crazy person.

I wondered what he'd thought of me (before he forgot my name), outside of the performative way he seemed to see me—as a leech, or a rival, or a threat, or a clown, or as an exact replica of himself, down to the way we stood, and belched, and cleared our throats.

I saved two photos that day at my parents' house. One of my father asleep after I helped him to bed, hat pulled down, glasses askew. And one that Leah sent from Spain: a selfie of her riding on the back of a motorcycle, dutifully wearing a helmet, her cheeks pink from the heat, holding a pizza box. If you pressed on the photo, you could see three whole seconds of video, hear her laughing, and get a glimpse of Lucas in front, no helmet, shaved head, looking relaxed. She'd texted to say that they'd gone straight to the beach, and how good it had felt to swim after a long plane ride—"It's a bit baptismal." Where the fuck did she learn to talk like that?

Downstairs, I sat with my mother. "The girl" who owned the horse, she explained, was the daughter of her friend down the road. The girl and her husband had started a special-ed school, but the school had gone bust and the horse was homeless.

"Who's taking care of it?"

"I know how to feed a horse."

"Are you mucking out the stall?"

"He's mostly outside."

I kept fidgeting, getting up to clean things.

"You should take him for a trot," she said.

"I don't know how to ride," I said.

"He needs to get his ya-yas out."

"Why don't you get your ya-yas out?"

Then she tucked her pants into her socks and went for a walk. I cleaned the kitchen and enjoyed being in the quiet house with her outside and him asleep.

My mother had cried a little, while finishing her breakfast, and I'd held her hand and kissed it, but her sadness didn't penetrate. I'd felt it in my face, the stony witnessing, waiting for it to pass. I couldn't fix her life. I wanted to get home, or go somewhere far away. I cleaned out the fridge, changed light bulbs, and ran the vacuum.

I took the plants from my car and went out to the garage for a shovel. The horse came by the garden and clocked me with his big orange eyeball, dragging the cinder block, cropping grass around my father's outdoor grill. I saw the stone gnome my parents had brought from our old house, the one we called Lorenzo Squink. I'd driven past that house not long ago and seen that it was for sale, and had gone in to take a look. The owners had put a pool where the chicken coop used to be, but left everything else—the rusty radiator in my parents' bathroom, the crappy fireplace tools I made in eighth-grade metal shop. All it needed was some red velvet ropes and you could open a museum. When we lived there, it was the five of us, my mother and four kids, against him. We were a unit and we gaslit him, and it must've been awful for an only child who grew up poor, to be so alone. For us he had a job he claimed to hate, and I guess we could've been nicer. Or maybe he deserved it?

When I was done in the garden, I checked on my father, who was still asleep, then went into the kitchen and made a stir-fry with everything minced into tiny bites, enough to put half in the freezer. My mother came in and told me I'd left the garden gate open, and the horse had gone in there and eaten her lettuce, cucumbers, new basil, squash, zucchini, and watermelon plants.

"Sorry."

We could see him out back through the living-room windows. His rusty reddish coat was the color my father's hair had once been, and I wondered whether it was him, reincarnated ahead of schedule. He was throwing his head around and having a good time, and that was when I noticed that the lead line was still attached to his halter but there was no cinder block dragging on the ground. He'd sheared it off on the garden fence, and now he strolled freely beneath a stand of white pine trees, joyfully rolling in the bed of golden pine needles, hooves in the air, whipping his tail around, then springing up and charging down the hill. The next time I saw him, he was in the pond, taking a dip. My father had also loved to swim naked, and to sit by the pond, bare-assed, doing the crossword. The horse came out of the water, shining, dark, and sleek as a seal.

We decided that one of us would have to confront him. If you're not a cowboy with a lasso, there is another way to catch a jumpy horse in an open field: put some oats in a bucket and shake it so that the horse can hear what sounds like dinner, then walk toward but also sort of away from him, in case he spooks. If you do this wrong, and even if you do it right, he might stomp you.

As I got closer, he started to whinny, a good sign, then he shoved his head in the bucket and ate some oats. There was the great wheel of his jaw, and the thick haunch of his neck. I could have grabbed his halter, but then he lifted his head and spun, heading for the road.

I imagined myself up there in a bone-jarring trot, sliding around in a saddle, trying to find my seat. Then he fell into a smooth canter, heading downhill. At the end of the driveway he cleared the fence, hooked left, opened his stride, and exploded into a gallop. His head went up and down, the sound of his hooves like the Pony Express. I thought of a mailman riding high, a hundred and sixty years ago, carrying the news. The President has been shot. He is grievously wounded. Ring the church bell.

I went back into the barn, put away the bucket, found my mother in the house, and told her I was leaving.

"Hey, what's that horse's name?"

"Chief," she said.

I should have stayed, had dinner, slept over, getting up with my father every hour or so, giving her a night of uninterrupted sleep. But my dog had been locked inside all day, and Marla was flying in later. We hadn't seen each other in a week. I had to go.

I looked for the horse on the road as I drove. There were double-wide trailers, and dead cars in front yards, and threatening political flags, and posted signs on spooky old trees with shaggy bark. He wasn't there.

While driving, I noticed an empty lighter in the cup holder, a vape pen, and a soda can on the floor of the passenger side. Someone had drawn on the dusty outside of the glass of the sunroof—a smiling kitty face, a dick and balls, and "Hi Daddy." All summer I'd been feeling subdued, stuffed down and worried, dreading Leah's departure.

I remembered the first time I saw Lucas, even before he and Leah were together, when I went to pick her up from school and found her at the boys' soccer game and watched him streak across the field to wipe out some kid with a slide tackle. He was brave and committed—short and barrel-chested—and it was a thrill to see him in action. A few weeks later, he tore ligaments in his ankle, and his soccer career ended. All last fall he'd show up at our house, hobbling around, looking bloated and sweaty, or I'd spot him on crutches on the sidelines with a video camera, and it was heartbreaking. By the time they started dating, he was a little tormented. He'd get into fights with his mom and be grounded, argue with Leah, scold her about something she drank or ate or said, then leave poems for her in the mailbox. At school he'd make a big deal of skipping lunch to do homework, but then not do it, and bomb the class. He hadn't got in anywhere he'd applied and was planning to spend a gap year working on a farm for some program in Vermont.

There were other boys I liked more, like Leah's friend Andre, who was going to Michigan, with his arm muscles and his handsome face, his shiny black curls, and a profile like something on a Roman coin. But Lucas was her first love, and he was honest, loyal, dutiful, sad, afraid of alcohol, drawn to conflict, self-pitying, valorous, and paranoid. And even though Leah had grown irritated at having to walk at his pace between classes and drive him places with his crutches sticking out the window, it had taught her to be considerate. Though it had made me feel out of sorts to see her accommodating him, even after he'd gotten off crutches, creating this space inside herself to console him, to contain his anxieties, having to be patient and lower her expectations, while they learned to be a couple. I wondered how they'd manage in Spain.