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it or not. I know you go to the mailbox every time your birthday nears, or during Christmas or Easter or any other time a father should acknowledge his only daughter, and I watch you flip the mailbox open and shut it just as fast. You always get this little smile when it’s empty. Every time, you shrug and get this smile on your face that I imagine is you saying,
Oh, well … maybe next year
, but that smile breaks my fucking heart. Because I know what’s underneath. And I wish I could make a card appear in the mailbox, or a heart appear where that gaping hole is in your father’s chest. But I can’t … and it doesn’t. So I say we
bury
the fucker. I say we pronounce him dead, and from this day forward he is. A dead father has got to be less painful than one who’s alive and doesn’t appreciate or even recognize that he has a daughter.”
    They say women develop faster than men. So do our interpersonal skills. Mostly. So you might guess I was reading into it. But I don’t think so. Those nine words meant the world to me.
    I wept. It was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me. I wept over the loss of my father—probably for the first time—and I simultaneously shed happy tears over finding someone who cared enough about me to do such a thing. Brett had found aheadstone that was so weatherworn it had no legible name, and he’d claimed it for me, for my life ahead. He encouraged me to talk to my father—or to the stone, at least—and to tell him how I felt. Then, once every year on the same day, he promised to bring me back to visit and “catch my father up” on what he’d missed.
    Brett was a winner. He was the real deal. And it was that first visit to my father’s “grave” when the little cartoon birds swooped off the Disney celluloid, singing, chirping, and stitching my damaged heart back together with multicolored ribbons borne in their beaks. I never looked at another boy through high school.
    After that, it was off to college together—to a school I wouldn’t even have put on my list had it not been his first choice (I figured I’d go to veterinary school right after, so where I did my under-grad wasn’t really all that important)—and a lifelong commitment to the eternal goof that he would quickly become (still somehow managing to be a successful goof). I haven’t ever regretted it, really, though he’s given me reasons to a few times.
    I’ll never forget his twenty-first birthday. He drank too much—and by “too much,” I mean it was a miracle he wasn’t hospitalized with alcohol poisoning in addition to severe lacerations. He’d attempted to open a beer bottle with his eye socket: a neat bar trick, except in this case the bottle cap proved more resilient than the skin protecting his orbital bone. Particularly funny, though he’d never admit it, the cap had been a twist-off. In fact, the entire incident was transformed in the retelling into a bar fight. No word as to whether the bottle also sought first aid.
    The kicker was that Brett’s two roommates heard me screaming, thought we were arguing, didn’t want to get involved, and stayed out the whole night at a friend’s. Brett and I stumbled back into his place at about seven forty-five a.m., while Matt and Corey, aka Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber, staggered in at eight. I was starving after staying up the whole night in the ER, so before I’d even changed my blood-splattered shirt I made myself a bowl of cereal and wound up dozing off, still seated upright withthe spoon in my hand. When Matt walked into the kitchen and saw me—eyes closed, blood everywhere—he assumed that Brett had
stabbed
me, and immediately started hatching an escape plan. He sprinted out the front door, stole a ladder from the next house over, and climbed up to Brett’s bedroom window, shouting at the top of his lungs for Brett to “Grab the necessities and get the fuck out before someone calls the fuzz!”
    Without addressing what he apparently