One Last Thing Before I Go

backseat, and her laugh, gleeful, like a child’s, makes him smile and breaks his heart at the same time.

CHAPTER47
    S ilver listens as Lily sings to the kids
.
“Oh, Mr. Sun,” “Michael Finnegan,” “Puff the Magic Dragon.” She’s wearing her hair down today, with no visible makeup, and she looks tired, he thinks.
    “So, who is she?” Casey says, coming up behind him.
    “Just a girl.” He had left her browsing over in the Fiction and Literature section, but she has tracked him down. It’s raining outside, a powerful summer rain that batters the bookstore window like applause. Hard rains like this make him miss his childhood, the smell of rubber slickers, the scrape of galoshes on pavement. It’s one in the afternoon but it looks like night outside. He is suddenly feeling depressed and irritable.
    “She’s cute.”
    “Yeah.”
    “She’s why you come in here,” Casey says, getting it.
    “Yeah.”
    “So what’s your status?”
    He shushes her, though she is speaking pretty softly. “No status,” he says.
    Casey looks him over. “How long have you been coming here?”
    “I don’t know.” He wishes he hadn’t brought her in here. He feels exposed.
    “A few weeks?” Casey says. “A month?”
    He looks at her.
    “Oh shit,” she says.
    “You swear a lot.”
    “Broken home.”
    “Fuck off.”
    “Touché.”
    “Come on,” he grumbles. “Let’s go.”
    “Why don’t you ask her out?” Casey says, standing her ground.
    “I’ve been waiting for the right time.”
    “Come on, Dad. When’s the last time you asked someone out?”
    He rubs the back of his head, still damp from the rain, while he considers. It has been so long since he was in any kind of relationship. He doesn’t know how to explain it, this paralysis that takes hold whenever he sees a woman he’d like to ask out. It infuriates him when he considers the years of solitude he has spent because of some latent shyness or fear of rejection he can’t seem to overcome when the moment demands it.
    “It’s been a while,” he says. Years, he thinks, although he isn’t really sure. Chronology has always been somewhat elusive to him.
    “She’s a musician, you’re a musician,” she says. “It’s cake. I mean, come on, Dad, you were a rock star!”
    “I was the drummer.”
    Casey shakes her head. “How do you not see the tragic irony here?”
    He shrugs. He gave up on irony years ago. It was that or death by prescription pills.
    “You were enough of a rock star to completely screw up your life,” she says. “And now, when you need to be one, when it will actually help you, suddenly you were just the drummer?”
    He looks at his daughter, so pretty and wise beyond her years, and he wants to weep from the loss. Casey seems to sense his mood, and she steps forward and kisses his cheek. He cannot remember the last time she kissed him, and he is dangerously close to dissolving. She places one hand on each of his shoulders and looks him in the eye.
    “Dad.”
    “Yes.”
    “You’re a good-looking guy. You’ve got that kind of cuddly bad-boy thing going on, like you’re dangerous, but only a little bit, you know? You have kind eyes and a killer smile, and life has beaten you up just enough to make women want to save you. Hell, even Mom slept with you again, and she hates you.” He gives her a look. “Sorry. You know what I mean. The point is, I always assumed you were swimming in women.”
    He shakes his head. “Nope.”
    She nods, understanding, from that one word, the immense loneliness he will never be able to articulate, and he is grateful to her for seeing him.
    “OK,” she says. “Here’s the thing. We are not leaving this store until you ask that babe out.”
    “Lily,” he says.
    “What?”
    “Her name is Lily.”
    Casey smiles. “OK then. Go get her.”
    * * *
    At the moment he approaches her, she suddenly crouches down on one knee to fix the clasp of her guitar case, and so he is now standing over her. He feels too large and imposing, so he backs away, but now the distance is too great, an awkward distance for conversation, so he takes a step forward, but now he has advanced, retreated, and advanced again, which makes him feel like an idiot, and if she’s aware of him standing there, he’s sure he looks like an idiot, so he goes back to his original position and waits for her to stand up, feeling much too big and awkward standing here in the Children’s Books section, with its miniature