Every fact I knew about my daughter’s life had come to me through Franny — Robin’s job, Robin’s marriage, Robin’s girl — relayed at the dinner table like news from a country I wasn’t allowed to visit.

It had not always been that way, or maybe it had, and I had only stopped noticing the way you stop noticing a slow tide.

When Robin was small I had been a good enough father in the manner of my generation, which is to say I was reliable and present and almost entirely silent about anything that mattered.

I taught her to ride a bike and change a tire and I did not once, that I can recall, ask her how she felt about anything, because it did not occur to me that a father was for that; a father was for the tire.

Franny was for the feelings.