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that makes the object so much more vital when found. As soon as we stepped into Besta-Wan, I would again materialize for my father. He made me guess which of his pockets held the quarters that I coveted for the jukebox, usually to play David Cassidy’s “I Woke Up in Love This Morning” as many times as I could before the pizza was ready. (I liked the part where he sang “Went to bed with you [pause] on my mind” because I understood that the pause contained some kind of sexual innuendo.) But on the road, my father’s concentration gave me a chance to observe him in his natural habitat. He was the opposite of my mother behind the wheel. He barely tapped the wheel to swerve away from imminent danger, changed lanes without signaling, so fast and crafty that the surrounding traffic seemed stock-still and deadpan, stuck in a blurred tableau of time and motion while our Fiat whipped in and out like a lone sperm on a stark microscopic slide.
    It was on one of these rides that I dubbed my father “the Condor” (a bird we were learning about in my third-grade class) for his smooth, graceful soar and his keen raptorial eye. He never missed a trick. The tininess of my father’s car made sitting in it with him seem illicit, like dancing close in a room crammed with strangers. The intimate details of breath and warmth of skin were unavoidable. Even though the Condor paid no attention to me when we were in the car together, his eyes fastened to the road and his thoughts billowing inside his head, steaming out his ears in paisley swirls I could practically see, still, I felt my pulse trotting in my temples and I had to suck air in hard through my nose to get any oxygen to my brain. Goofing around at home was one thing—crawling all over him, bouncing on his knee, stepping on his feet while I wrapped my body around his torso—but being in the world with him, venturing out into the almost-night, just the two of us, felt more meaningful somehow.
    I liked being with the Condor, and I liked being seen with him. Women noticed him as we drove by. They’d do double takes, craning to catch his eye or glimpse his profile at a red light. And it wasn’t just because we were doing eighty in a convertible; I’d seen the same phenomenon at the supermarket and the pizza parlor, anywhere my father and I were alone. Being alone with my father was like being my father; my need for attention would shrink until it was a tiny tablet dissolving under his tongue. I was spread thin across the membrane of his field of vision. I saw what he saw, saw what the world must be like from inside of his skin. It wasn’t that my dad was classically handsome; I’d seen how women looked at handsome men, with a complicated mix of curiosity and coaxing that tipped over into stuttering shyness. But with my father it was different, as though these women already knew him, as though they were trying to place his familiar face in their haunted, heated memories. A certain look would pass across their faces, a look it took me years to understand, the heady private pleasure of remembering bits and pieces, the wavy black hair or the little patch of beard under the purled and suck-able lower lip. And when the features fall into place there is a pang, a half-smile to which the face can’t help but surrender. I couldn’t say then and can’t say now whether any of these women had actually known my father, or whether my sense of tuning into a private frequency had more to do with a general adult playground of sexuality that I, despite my savvy interpretation of David Cassidy lyrics, had yet to fully grasp. But I noticed. And I felt lucky to have such a stone-fox chick-magnet for a father.
    One Wednesday evening, turning the corner onto Encinitas Boulevard a mere block from the Besta-Wan Pizzeria, the Fiat made a jaunty series of lurches, a sputtering balletic sequence of coughs caused by my dad’s machine-gun gas-and-throttle dance. When we were on the highway and he’d