It was Del who made me call Lorene — really call her — though he’d have said he did no such thing, that a man’s business with his daughter was his own.

But he’d planted it, at the diner, and it wouldn’t leave me.

So one evening in early summer I sat on my back porch and called my daughter and did not do the ten bright minutes.

I told her the truth instead.

I told her I was lonely, that I’d been lonely since her mother died, that I’d moved to a town in the middle of nowhere out of a grief I’d never once talked to her about because I’d decided, somewhere, that a father was supposed to be the strong one, the one who needed nothing, and that I’d been so busy being that man that I’d let her mother’s death turn me into a stranger to my own child.

There was a long silence on the line.