One Last Thing Before I Go

ride, and they throb softly beneath his skin, just like they should. It is a thing of beauty, this car of his daughter’s, and Silver tries not to think about the fact that it was bought for her by the man who isn’t her father but who does a much better job of it.
    The thing about living alone is that it gives you a lot of time to think. You don’t necessarily reach any conclusions, because wisdom is largely a function of intelligence and self-awareness, not time on your hands. But you do become very good at thinking yourself into endless loops of desperation in half the time it would take a normal person. So, sitting there in her car, as the Japanese engine thrums along with more horsepower than any teenage girl could ever possibly need, his dark thoughts rise up and fan out before him at record speed.
    He thinks about the fact that the lives of everyone close to him seem to improve dramatically once they leave him behind. Denise found herself a better husband, Casey a better father, Pat McReedy a better career. He is a stepping-stone to a better life. No, that would imply that he somehow helped. He is the nonessential ballast that you toss out of the plane to achieve flight.
    * * *
    He looks over at Casey, who is humming along lightly to the ridiculous, mechanical song on the radio. Fucking Auto-Tune. She still looks so young to him; too young to have been through what he and Denise put her through, too young for this $40,000 car, and too young to be driving to an abortion clinic with her poor excuse of a father riding shotgun, only because she loves her mother too much to involve her in this sad and tawdry business.
    Early Intervention is in a corporate park off I-95, just a few miles north of Elmsbrook. Their sign, a simple “E.I.” set against a pink clover-shaped background, is discreet and strangely cheerful. Casey parks and they walk through a small outdoor plaza where corporate smokers have ritualistically gathered, greedily inhaling their first – and secondhand smoke.
    “Do you like my car?”
    “Sure. It’s a great car.”
    “What? I said, ‘Did I lock the car?’”
    “Oh. I don’t remember.”
    She gives him a funny look. “Are you OK there, Silver?”
    He wishes she would call him Dad.
    “Sure.”
    He doesn’t think he’s ever told her about the tinnitus. Right now it is ringing like a siren in his ears, wrapping her voice in a fuzzy static shell.
    “You look a little . . . off.”
    “I’m fine. I’m just having some ear issues.”
    She looks at him for another moment, then jogs back across the plaza holding out her keychain until she is in range to lock it. As he watches her run, something in his chest catches, and with no preamble, a short, guttural sob bursts forth from his mouth. A random memory: It’s a snowy evening and Denise, Casey, and he are walking back from somewhere, he doesn’t remember where. Casey is running ahead, up the slope to the front door of the small Cape Cod they bought, somewhat impulsively, a few years earlier when Denise told him she was pregnant. Casey, two and a half feet high, lifts her knees like a soldier, marching around in the snow with unfettered delight. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she,” Denise says. He looks at Denise, her hair glittering in a crown of dissolving snowflakes, and in that moment he is more in love than he’s ever been; with this woman, with this little girl, with this family they’ve made. Casey’s tiny boot prints surround them, and as she squeals with delight, he thinks to himself, This is the most perfect moment I will ever know.
    “Silver?”
    She is back, smiling uncertainly at him.
    “You sure this is what you want?” he says, not because he sees an alternative but because it just feels like the kind of thing that, in hindsight, you’ll need to know you said.
    “Do you have a better idea?”
    “No.”
    “I’m early enough that they can use the aspiration method, which is basically the equivalent of inducing a period. There’s no pain and no recovery. I won’t feel a thing.”
    “OK.”
    “And this will stay our little secret, right?”
    “Right.”
    He has to admit, it feels good to share a secret with her.
    “Thanks.”
    “For what?”
    “For not telling me I’m an idiot for having unprotected sex.”
    “I guess I thought that was obvious.”
    She laughs. Neither of them has made a move toward the front door of the clinic yet.
    “Have you had a lot of sex?” he says.
    She is momentarily