my age, but felt completely different when I was a man, and a father, and that girl was you.
I told him to get a haircut and get a job, then come back and ask me again.
A week later, he was back at my door. His mullet was lopped. He had just started working at McDonald’s.
Your mother cackled like a witch and told me next time, I should be more specific.
You spent hours in your room before that first date with Brent. When you finally opened your door, I smelled perfume and hairspray and all of these strange, womanly smells that I never expected to come from my own daughter. And you were beautiful. So beautiful. I scanned my eyes across your face looking for disagreeable things—too much mascara, too-heavy eyeliner—but there was nothing but a light brushing of color that brought out the pale blue of your eyes. I can’t remember what you were wearing or how you had styled your hair (this is your mother’s domain) but I do remember this breathless feeling in my chest, as if the alveoli inside my lungs were slowly collapsing, slowly depriving me of any oxygen, slowly depriving me of my little tomboy who climbed trees and ran after me when I went for my morning walks.
I now know what it feels like to have a real stroke, even a mini one, but I was certain when I watched Brent Lockwood drive you away in his car that I was having a full-on heart attack. I was so worried about this one boy, this first boy, that I never realized that there would be others. That some of them would make me long for Brent with his third-hand Impala and the smell of French fries he left in his wake.
Why am I thinking about this boy now? Because he was the first? Because I thought he would be the last?
I am thinking about him because of Claire.
Paul called me on the telephone tonight. He was concerned about my health. He made the right kind of small talk. He said all of the right things. He sounded right in every way, though I know that everything about him is wrong.
He thinks of me as old-fashioned, and I let him think that because it serves my purpose. Your mother is the feisty one, the grumpy old hippie who keeps him on his toes. I am the fatherly type who smiles and winks and pretends that he is everything he makes himself out to be.
I told him the story of Brent Lockwood, the boy who asked permission to date my oldest, now missing, daughter.
As I expected, Paul immediately apologized for not asking me whether or not he could date Claire. He is nothing if not a good mimic of appropriate behaviors. Had we been in person rather than on the telephone, I am certain he would’ve dropped to bended knee as he asked for my permission. But he wasn’t, so it was his voice that conveyed the respect and feeling.
Conveyed.
As your mother has said, Paul could be a belt in a donut factory, he is so good at sticky, emotional conveyances.
On the phone call, I laughed, because Paul’s request to date your sister was very late in coming, and he laughed, too, because that was what was expected of him. After an appropriate amount of time had passed, he alluded to a future request, one that would put his relationship with Claire on a more permanent footing, and I realized that though this stranger had been dating my daughter for only a few weeks, he was already thinking about marriage.
Marriage. That’s what he called it, though men like Paul do not marry women. They own them. They control them. They are voracious gluttons who devour every part of a woman, then clean their teeth with the bones.
I’m sorry, sweetheart. Since you were taken, I have gotten so much more leery than I used to be. I see conspiracies around corners. I know that darkness is everywhere. I trust no one but your mother.
So I cleared my throat a few times and inserted some pained emotion into my tone and told Paul that I could not in all good conscience see myself giving any man permission to marry either of my daughters, or to even attend their weddings, until I know what happened to my oldest child.
Like Pepper, and like you for that matter, Claire is as impulsive as she is stubborn. She is also my baby