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“Daddy, I missed you, too. I don’t know why Mom—”
    “No ‘Mom,’ Krista. Not right now.”
    Despite his unshaven jaws and slightly disheveled hair threaded with gray, my father was looking handsome, I thought. Even with his battered face, discolored pouches of skin beneath his eyes as if he hadn’t been sleeping well, or had been rubbing his fists into his eyes, and his forehead creased in thought or worry, Eddy Diehl was a handsome man. The suede coat he wore seemed to be padded with a woolly down like a large upright tongue—what comfort such a burly coat could give, if you were squeezed against it. And dark-graying hairs sprouting up from Daddy’s chest visible at his throat, what comfort in pressing my face against that throat, hiding my face there.
    We’d ascended from the rain-pelted dark of Depot Street, the warehouse district, the scrubby waterfront of the Black River, now turning onto the Highlands Bridge that was a beautiful suspension bridge above the river with a wire-net surface that hummed beneath our car tires. A wild happiness was loosed inside the 1976 Caddie Seville with the cream-colored leather interior, Canyon Red finish and whitewall tires—“Fasten your seat belt! Taking off!” Daddy was laughing, of sheer delight, or defiance; I heard myself laugh, excited and uneasy.
    Where was Daddy taking me? Across the suspension bridge, into a nowlightly falling rain, mist rising from the invisible river below and a blurred vision of lights along the river, the dim stretch of derelict riverfront brick mills and factories shut down for as long as I could remember— Link Ladies Luxury Hosiery, Reynolds Bros. Paper Goods, Johnston Tomato Cannery.
    These familiar Sparta landmarks I’d been seeing all my life long before the trouble had destroyed my family.
    “—damned proud, Krista. Seeing my li’l girl mixing it up with those big hulking girls.”
    Big hulking girls seemed to mean something other than its words. Big hulking girls contained something sexy, sniggering.
    I asked Daddy how he’d known where I was? That I’d stayed after school, and was in the gym? Daddy tapped the side of his nose saying, “Your old man has you on his radar, Krista. Better believe it.”
    Was he drunk, I wondered. Growly-teasing voice, his words just perceptibly slurred.
    And yet: there is no happiness like being fifteen years old and being driven by your (forbidden) father to a destination you can’t—yet—guess. Your handsome (forbidden) father so clearly exulting in your presence as in his possession of you as a thief might gloat over having made away with the most precious of valuables, and no one in pursuit.
    I was thinking how no one else loved me like this. No one else would wish to possess me.
    Years ago before my father had moved from Sparta, in that interregnum of confusion and nightmare when Edward Diehl was being “taken into police custody”—“released from police custody”—banished from our household but living with relatives locally, it would happen that, as if by accident, Daddy would turn up at places where Ben and I were: boarding the school bus after school, at the mall while our mother was shopping for groceries, riding our bicycles along the Huron Pike Road. I was thrilled to see Daddy waving at us but Ben stiffened and turned away.
    Muttering under his breath Like some damn ghost haunting us. Wish he would die!
    It was a nasty side of Ben, I’ve never forgiven him, the eager way he reported back to our mother: “Daddy was following us! Daddy waved at us!” My mother was terrified—or wished to declare that she was terrified—that my father might “kidnap” us, such incidents left her semihysterical with indecision. Should she call the police, should she call my father’s family, should she try to ignore Eddy Diehl’s “harassment” or— what should would a responsible mother do?
    No one knew. Many opinions were offered but no one knew. If you believed that Edward Diehl