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love, the one person who could assuage my hangovers, comfort my aching limbs and give absolution to my sins.
    “Oh, Daddy, I knew you’d come. I just knew it,” she said, flinging herself at me.
    I dug my face into her shampoo-scented hair and clutched the familiar geography of her bonesand flesh. “Did I ever stand you up?” Then, laughing: “Don’t answer that.” Because there had been times, of course, when it had been impossible for me to come.
    “Wonder World today, Dad?” she asked.
    The sun hurled its rays against my eyeballs, penetrating the dark glasses, and the prospect of those whirling rides at the amusement park spread sickness through my veins. But aware that Alison was there behind the white curtains, I assured Holly: “Whatever you say, baby, whatever you say.” Wanting Alison to know that somebody loved me. “The sky’s the limit.”
    Holly was mine on Thursdays, and during the two years of our Thursdays together, we had made the circuit many times—shopping trips to fancy stores, movie matinees, picnics on Moosock Ridge, bowling, Wonder World in season—all the things an adult can do with a child. I’d always been careful to indulge her, basking in her delight. We shared the unspoken knowledge that we were playing a special kind of hooky, each of us a truant, she from that well-regulated and orderly world of her mother’s and I from the world of too many martinis, too many girls, too many long shots that had never come in.
    For some reason, I thought of my father. Occasionally, Holly and I journeyed out to the cemetery where I stood at his grave and tried to recall him. I most often remembered the time, a few weeks before he died, when we sat together at the nursing home. After long minutes of silence, he’d said: “The important thing, Howie, is to be a man.”
    He began to cry, tears overflowing his red-rimmed eyes, and I pitied him, pitied all the old people who could only look back, look back. After a while, I asked: “What’s a man, Dad?” Not really curious but wanting to say something.
    My poor father. Who’d had too much booze and too little love and no luck at all, at cards or dice or all those jobs. And all the deals that had collapsed.
    “To be a man,” my father said, wiping his cheeks, “is to look at the wreckage of your life and to confront it all without pity for yourself. Without alibis. And to go on. To endure—”
    It had been a long day and I had been impatient to get away from the ancient abandoned man who called himself my father. I left shortly afterward, thinking: he’d always had a way with words, hadn’t he? And what had it gotten him in the end? A wife whose early death had given him an excuse to drown himself in bottle after bottle, while his son, whose birth was the cause of that death, was shunted from uncle to aunt to cousin. Yet, he had tried hard to be a father, in his way, always showing up on holidays, bundled with gifts and stories of great adventures in the cities he visited on his sales routes.
    Now, Holly and I drove along soft-shaded Spruce Street and I was relieved that a trip to the cemetery was not on the agenda that day. Holly chatted gaily. She told me about the neighborhood carnival she and her friends had staged and how their names had appeared in the newspaper because they’d donated the proceeds to charity. She described the shopping trips for schoolclothes, because September loomed ahead. She brought me up to date on all the things that make up the life and times of a ten-year-old girl, and I barely listened, taking pleasure in her presence alone. She wore pigtails, and she was dark, unlike Alison, who was blond, and this secretly delighted me. Holly prattled on: there was a fabulous new ride at Wonder World, “The Rocket Trip to the Moon,” that all the kids were crazy about, and could we go on it, Dad, could we, huh, please?
    “Why not?” I asked. All the “why nots” I had tossed her on Thursdays, like bouquets of love.