and watched the street. I was so excited for his arrival that I’d worn my nice dress, given to me by the rock climber, and I was fluttery in my stomach. Cars passed outside the driveway. Each one held the possibility of being him. We waited. “I don’t think he’s going to come,” my mother finally said after some time. We went back inside. I felt like I’d been emptied out. The day, charged with excitement, newness, extravagance, and mystery, unlike other days, changed back into a dull and ordinary day. Just us again, and nothing to do.
“Let’s go for a skate?”
When my mother and I went roller skating, our favorite thing was to find the soft cement. If you were walking, the seam between one type of pavement and another was not obvious, but on skates you felt a clear difference between the two. We said the soft pavement was “like butter.” Transitioning onto the buttery parts after the rough, jangly pavement—the roughest parts vibrating up through my knees and hips to made my cheeks shake and my eyeballs itch—felt like floating.
One section we’d found was near the lot on Oak Grove where we used to live. Our old detached studio, along with the main house, had since been ripped down and replaced with a brown-shingled Comerica Bank. “Your umbilical cord is buried in the dirt somewhere underneath that bank,” she said when we passed it. This disturbed me; surely other mothers didn’t bury umbilical cords in yards.
The soft cement was located in front of a faux-Palladian office building, with two swooping walkways curving up over a rock garden to an entrance door made of tinted glass. The cement on the ramps was silken, lined with curved iron banisters. We skated in a circle up one, down the other, and back up again.
She kept glancing at me as we skated; I didn’t let on that I knew she was looking. “You know, you’re just the daughter I wanted,” she said. “Exactly the one. On the farm before you were born there was this little girl, three or four years old, with her mother. A little Taurus girl, precocious and smart. I thought, I want that.”
“I know,” I said. She’d told me the story before. (“I don’t only love you,” she’d said often. “I also like you.”) “And he named a computer after me?”
“He pretended he hadn’t, afterward.” And then she told me the story—again—of how they’d named me together in the field, how he vetoed all her choices until she thought of Lisa. “He loves you,” she said. “He just doesn’t know he loves you.” This was hard to grasp. “If he saw you, really saw you and understood what he was missing, how he wasn’t showing up for you, it would kill him. He’d be like this.” She stopped skating and grabbed the railing and clutched her heart, gave an anguished, grief-stricken look, hunched her back as if she’d fall over and die.
I tried to think of what he’d been missing. Nothing came up.
I heard from a few people much later that in those days my father carried a photo of me in his wallet. He would pull it out and hold it up at dinner parties, showing it around, and say, “It’s not my kid. But she doesn’t have a father, so I’m trying to be there for her.”
“It’s his loss,” my mother said as we skated home. “His great, great loss. He’ll get it someday. He’ll come back and it’ll rip his heart open, when he sees you, how much you’re like him, and how much he’s missed.”
I sensed it was the right time to make a play for a kitten.
The office of the Humane Society was located on the edge of the Baylands Nature Preserve, in a government-style building.
“They have too many kittens,” my mother said on the drive over, as I tried to contain my excitement. “If they don’t find homes for them, they put them to sleep.”
The main room was open-plan, echoey, with a beamed high ceiling and a stone floor. The animals were in the back, through a door. The woman at the front desk was dressed in an army-green uniform with a matching belt and many stiff pockets. She pulled out a clipboard and asked where we lived and how long we’d been there.
“A house in Menlo Park,” my mother said. “For a few months now.”
“And before that?” the woman asked.
“We stayed in a friend’s house for two months,” my mother