I.
The text came on a Tuesday, while I was lying on my back under a reach-in cooler at the Vietnamese grocery on Detroit Avenue with a flashlight in my teeth.
I didn't read it until I'd found the problem, which was a condenser fan motor that had given up the way old motors do, quietly and all at once. Mrs. Tran stood over me holding a bag of frozen dumplings against her chest like a hot-water bottle, and when I slid out and told her it was a forty-dollar part and not a four-thousand-dollar part, she pressed the dumplings into my hands and wouldn't take them back.
In the truck I wiped my fingers on a rag and looked at my phone.
Dad! So Saturday is confirmed. Wren & Salt, 7:30. Peter's parents are SO excited to finally meet you.
A second bubble, a minute later.
Maybe wear something nice? Like a jacket? Philippa is kind of particular. Not in a bad way. Just particular.
Then a third, after what must have been a long pause, because the timestamps were four minutes apart.
I can send you money for something if you want. No pressure. Love you.
I sat there with the engine idling and the dumplings sweating through the paper bag on the passenger seat. My daughter is twenty-nine years old. She works in brand strategy at a firm downtown with glass walls and a coffee machine that cost more than my truck did used. She is getting married next summer to a quiet, decent young architect named Peter Lindqvist, and she had just offered to buy her father a jacket so that he would not embarrass her in front of his parents.
I want to be honest about how it landed, since honesty is the whole reason I'm telling any of this. It didn't land like a punch. It landed like a splinter. Small, and in a place you use all the time.
I typed back: I have a jacket.
She sent a heart. Then: The navy one?
I don't own a navy one. I have never owned a navy one. I think she was remembering some other father, maybe one from a catalog, or maybe one she'd put together in her head over the years out of the parts of me she liked and the parts of other men she wished I had.