i am looking for my dad thru a glass window. there are four old men playing jazz and i realize one of them is him. i am standing outside shivering in my new red coat, i wore it for good luck. i have the urge to run away before he sees me, walk down the drive and keep going but then he is there, looking thru the door and he is coming out and we hug awkwardly. i don't want him to touch me. that was part of the whole nervousness, the debating over whether i can just back away and say hello, extend my hand, it is the touching that scares me the most.

my step-mother is there. it is her 60th birthday. she is quite a bit older than my dad but they both look so old.

in shari's, (i knew we would go here, it is like a denny's, so appropriate) my dad's hands are shaking. i realize he is scared too. his fingers are yellow and they are bent a weird way. he says it's from pulling leather to fit over books. he is boasting about slant sixes and mopar and i can barely look at him. his hair is completely gray and it is thinning in a way i couldn't have imagined. my dad has wild and tangled dark hair, not unlike charles manson. my dad is not this sad grey man before me.

i order a french dip sandwich and he says that is just what he was about to order. he says when i was little, i would ride in the backseat and ask him to drive me to togos sandwich shop and say "give me the meat daddy" (that sounds like an awful double entendre doesn't it?)

he says it's been ten years since he's seen me. i say "no, only six." his eyes flash. we are on the verge of disagreeing but we dance around it. he is being ugly to my step-mother. he is complaining about the $33.00 bill. he is complaining about terrorists and says he only smokes pot from june to july now.

i am removed from the whole conversation. i am watching myself sit there, talking with a false lift to my voice. i am a character in a play. i am looking at my watch under the table, wishing the hands to move to six faster.

then it is over quickly, in a parking lot. snow is falling on my shoulders and he hugs me again. he holds on but i pull away.