And so my daughter grew up bringing her heart to her mother and her flat tires to me, and it worked, it genuinely worked, for years, because Franny was such a wide warm channel between us that Robin and I never had to build a direct one.

Then Robin moved away, and married, and had Wren, and the visits got shorter, and every year the direct line between my daughter and me carried a little less, until it carried only logistics and weather, and we both told ourselves that was just what happened, that was just fathers and grown daughters, when the truth was that we had never learned to speak to each other because we had never had to.

Franny translated.

Franny carried.