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reestablished contact.
     She supposed part of that could be blamed on distance. Before moving back to the city, she and Mom and Roger had been trapped in Gooberville for what seemed like an eternity. But her father hadn’t exactly strained himself to keep in touch.
     Until now, that is.
     Something had happened, he’d told her. Something that had made him realize what a fool he’d been for allowing their relationship to become so fragmented. What that something was remained a mystery, but at the time he said it, his words had been like a melody to Jessie, a sad but reassuring song about love and loss and hope.
     Unfortunately, the second verse didn’t quite live up to the hype.
     Shortly after he contacted her, Jessie had agreed to meet with him for lunch. Hot dogs and malts at Superdawg, one of the family’s favorite haunts when she was a kid. But the meeting turned out to be just as awkward as those two-minute phone calls. And what talking they did do felt like an interrogation—Daddy dear obsessed with her love life, wanting to know who she was dating and how he treated her.
     Jessie didn’t hide her irritation.
     “Who I hang out with,” she finally told him, “is none of your fucking business.”
     She’d thrown in the F-bomb for shock effect, showing him that she was no longer his darling little girl. And it worked. That moment, in fact, was the sour note that knocked the entire melody off-key.
     By the time he dropped her off at home, their conversation had been reduced to monosyllabic, caveman grunts. And after he left, she went directly upstairs and cried into her pillow for three straight hours.
     But Jessie wasn’t a quitter.
     Despite the disaster, she couldn’t escape the feeling of longing she had whenever she thought of her father. She wanted to hate him, but couldn’t. Something about the smell of him reminded her of her childhood, of a time when all was good and clean and safe in the world.
     He smelled like home. And Jessie wanted more than anything to be back beneath his protective cover.
     So she called him, and they met again.
     And a third time.
     Better, but not perfect.
     But maybe perfect was a pipe dream. Because no matter how hard she tried, Jessie just couldn’t rid herself of the resentment she felt. A resentment that seemed to underscore their entire relationship.
     Yet here she was now. Standing in his apartment on a chilly Thursday morning.
     Mom and Roger had gone away for the month, and despite her mother’s skepticism, and her own serious misgivings, Jessie had accepted her father’s invitation to spend the time with him.
     It was almost as if he wanted to prove himself. To prove to her that this newfound desire for contact was more than just a passing fad, or half a decade’s worth of guilt piling up on him.
     The least she could do was give him that chance.
     So instead of throwing the box across the room, she ran her thumb up under the spot where the edges of the wrapping paper met and tore it open. Just as she suspected, inside was a single key, attached to a tiny, ceramic figurine of Lisa Simpson.
     The key chain was a nice touch. Jessie had been a Simpsons fan for as long as she could remember. When she was small, she and her dad had watched the show together every Sunday night, and she still made an effort to catch the nightly reruns.
     The key fit the front door to his apartment. He’d given her a copy her first day there, but she had lost it at school a few days ago and had been forced to wait in the lobby until he came home that evening.
     He was really pissed at first, lashing out at her with a sarcastic remark about teenagers and their lack of responsibility, but one thing she had learned in these two weeks was that he was the kind of guy who couldn’t stay mad for long.
     Not at her, at least.
     And while that small fact didn’t exactly have her jumping for joy, it was, she supposed, a step in the right direction.
     
    S HE MISSED