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“We’re not ready to eat,” Kelly says. “We need Daddy.”

“He’s thinking,” Katie says.

And it’s true that he has gone off by himself, and Kelly does not look in his direction now — directly behind her, a few dozen yards away, very near the river, very near the water, almost at the edge of the water — she does not look because she is already quite aware of the fact that he is thinking, but that doesn’t mean things are the way they should be when a family goes on a picnic and decides it’s time for food.

“I’m not eating without Daddy,” Kelly says, loudly, so he can hear. Katie has been speaking in hushed tones.

And Kelly’s mother speaks now in the same hush. “Your sister’s right. He’ll come when he’s ready.” She has not even turned her face in order to take sides with Katie. She is still looking away, although not quite toward her husband.

Katie picks up the sandwich in front of her and begins to peel the plastic away. Finally Kelly’s mother arranges herself on the blanket, though without looking directly at either of her daughters, and begins to pull open a bag of chips. All of this is too much for Kelly. She grabs her own sandwich and jumps up and turns away from these silly people and her mother hisses her name at her but she is already moving away, moving quickly across the grass to the massive-shouldered hunch of her father.

She arrives behind him and pulls up, her desire to be near him suddenly pressed back by the force of his self-absorption. She hesitates now. But she wants this too much. “Daddy,” she says.

He does not answer, does not move. And the gravitational poles abruptly shift: what pressed her back before — his silence, his inwardness, his obliviousness — now pull her powerfully toward him. She circles him, moving into the narrow space between her father and the water, and he lifts his face to her.

She has heard already many times: you have your father’s eyes. When she was toddling with language, a question formed inside her and she held it close to her for some days until one night at bedtime she stood before her father, ready to go off with her mother, and she was seeking his ritual kiss, which he would give her on the forehead, but before he even began to lean toward her in his deliberate, slow-motioned way, she asked him the question at last: “Daddy, do I have your eyes?” And he did not say a word. Instead, he pulled her hands out before her and turned them over, palms upward, and he reached with his own right hand and plucked at his eye, closing it at once, smooth-lidded, and he doubled the hand into a gentle fist, and he held the fist over her left hand and opened it, and then he closed her hand. And he did this with his other eye, just the same way, and after he closed her other hand and both his eyes had vanished before her, she dared not move: she had his eyes, she had them in the palms of her hands — she could feel their shape, their weight there — and she did not move, and she barely let herself draw a breath, and they stood there before each other for what felt to Kelly like a long time, like a very long time, like a very very long time, and after a while she began to tremble from what she held, from what she was responsible for. So she lifted her right hand and brought it forward very carefully, and she turned it, and she put her fist against the place of his left eye, and she opened her fist, and she felt his eye pop open beneath her palm. She took her hand away. Her father’s left eye was restored. She brought forth her left hand, and she restored his right eye as well. And he looked at her with those eyes. For another long time, he looked at her, and his eyes did not blink, did not move. They held not the slightest trace of anything she could ever possibly read.

And now again, his large, wide-set, deep-winter-midnight eyes — so much like Kelly’s eyes — as a child certainly but even more clearly so as an adult — his eyes beside the Alabama River, with the five-year-old Kelly standing before him, are empty of any emotion Kelly can perceive. And she holds out her hand with her sandwich, and she says, “Time to eat. Take mine.”

And he reaches up and he takes the sandwich from Kelly, and she feels a sweet leaping inside her. But he immediately lays the sandwich on the grass beside him, and the leaping stops in her, everything stops. Though his eyes are open upon her, they have vanished and she does not have them, and so she does what she wants most to do, what she has come here, actually, to do. She falls forward onto him, her arms going around his neck and her head pressing against his, and she says, “I love you, Daddy,” and she wants him to speak, wants for him to draw her even closer and to speak, to tell her this thing that she has told him. But instead she feels her wrists clasped tight, feels herself being peeled away, and her father’s hands grasp her under the arms and her body moves backward and upward and her father is standing up now and she floats before him, his arms extended, holding her away from him.

He is smiling. A thinly stretched, barely upturned smile. It is, nevertheless, perceptibly a smile, and this is all that Kelly sees for now, and it balances her disappointment in failing to evoke the words she wishes to hear — words she has not yet heard from her father — not ever ever ever — and the smile even balances the fright of this sudden physical state she finds herself in. And in this balance her feelings are free to sort themselves out as she hangs in mid-air in his strong hands: she does feel his strength, she does trust him to protect her out here, she does feel safe where she is — and he lifts her higher, his smile angling up to her as she rises, and so she laughs. Kelly laughs and her father draws her down toward him — the tease, the come-here-my-baby — and then he abruptly lifts her higher, and this is a thing that once delighted her, as a toddler, when she had no words and when she knew only the strength of her father’s hands and the thrill of being almost in a certain place you want to be and then abruptly not being there but knowing you are still safe and can go back again and at the very same moment your body is thrilled, is flying. She feels all that now. Her father does this once more, draws her to him and at the last moment lifts her, and she laughs again but now he does not draw her in. He keeps her far away from him, high above him, and he begins a slow turn, and Kelly looks up from her father and she sees her mother and her sister standing at the blanket, looking this way, and then she sees a distant tree line, and then she sees the river, running blue before her, running fast and wide, and her father has stopped turning, and still she hangs in the air. She looks down at her father and the smile is gone. He is looking at her steadily, carefully, as if thinking what to do with her, as if trying to decide who she is, and she hangs there above him and she says, “Okay, Daddy.”

He does not move.

“Daddy, I want down,” she says.

And he does not move. He does not show a thing in his face.

“Please, Daddy,” she says.

Nothing.

And now her mother’s voice is behind her. “Lenny.” Her father’s name. Invoked by her mother like this only in very bad moments.

And still he looks at Kelly as if he does not even know who she is. She squeezes her eyes shut. And she is moving. Her father is turning again with her still held high. She opens her eyes. Below her is her mother. Her father has put his back to her. Her mother lifts her face to Kelly and the eyes — which are not Kelly’s eyes — she does not have her mother’s eyes — these eyes below are wide and Kelly knows the feeling in them, she is beginning to feel the same thing scrabbling in the center of her chest like a sharp-clawed little animal trapped there.