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along. Once, our gazes held for a split second, and it seemed to me that I saw betrayal in her eyes. My betrayal of her. A father
wasn’t supposed to abandon a child like that. Would she ever forgive me?
    The ride finally ended and she disembarked. She came toward me on fragile legs, as if she were walking a tightrope. Her hand trembled as I caught it. Was she avoiding my eyes? I told her I was sorry, that I should have gone with her, that I didn’t think it would be so—so terrible. She assured me that it wasn’t
that
bad, that, sure, she’d been a
little
scared but it was nothing, really, nothing. We both knew this was a gentle lie. For my sake.
    As we walked along hand in hand, the idea for the story that eventually became “Mine on Thursdays” came forth. I had been thinking how lucky I was that our love for each other was so simple and secure that my betrayal—if that was the word—of her a few moments before did not threaten us. Yet, what if our love wasn’t secure? What if that small betrayal in the park was only one more of many betrayals? What if it had been a final betrayal?
    What if? What if?
My mind raced, and my emotions kept pace at the sidelines, the way it always happens when a story idea arrives, like a small explosion of thought and feeling.
What if?
What if an incident like that in the park had been crucial to a relationship between father and daughter? What would make it crucial? Well, what if the father, say, was divorced from the child’s mother and the incident happened during one of his visiting days? And what if …
    Mine on Thursdays
    To begin with, it took more than two hours to drive from Boston to Monument, twice the usual time, because of an accident near Concord that caused a traffic backup that turned a three-mile line of cars into a giant metal caterpillar inching ponderously forward. Meanwhile, I had a splitting headache, my eyes were like raw onions and my stomach lurched on the edge of nausea, for which I fully accepted the blame. Ordinarily, the night before my Thursdays with Holly, I took it easy, avoided involvements and went to bed early. But yesterday afternoon, I’d had a futile clash with McClafflin—all arguments with employers are futile—and had threatened to quit, an empty gesture that caused him to smile because he knew about all my traps. This led to a few solitary and self-pitying drinks at the bar across the street, leaving me vulnerable to an invitation to a party in Cambridge, a party that turned out to be nothing more than pseudo-intellectual talk, plus liquor, the effect of which was pseudo: promising so much and delivering little except a clanging hangover and the familiar and desperate taste ofold regrets. Somehow, I managed to survive the morning and left at my usual hour, aware that McClafflin was watching my painful progress through the office. And I thought: “The hell with you, Mac. You think I’m going to leave her waiting uselessly, while I take a cold shower and sleep it off. But Holly expects me and I’ll be there.”
    I
was
there, late maybe but present and accounted for, and Holly leaped with delight when she saw me drive into her street. I made a reckless U-turn, knowing that Alison would be watching from the window, frowning her disapproval. The scarlet convertible in itself was sufficient to insult her cool gray New England eyes and my lateness was an affront to her penchant for punctuality (she’d been a teacher before our marriage and still loved schedules and timetables). Anyway, the brakes squealed as I pulled up in front of the house on the sedate street. On impulse, I blew the horn, long and loud. I always did things like that, to provoke her, killing myself with her, or killing whatever was left of what we’d had together, like a dying man hiding the medicine in the palm of his hand instead of swallowing the pill that might cure him.
    Holly came streaking off the porch, dazzling in something pink and lacy and gay. Holly, my true