“Miss, I’m going to ask my partner to have the man step from the car and walk under the street lamp. You should be able to see him pretty well from here, enough to know if it could be your father,” the officer said.

“But I haven’t seen him in five years,” Darcy said.

“Just take a good look,” the officer said. “Is your mother home?”

“No. She’s at work. There’s nobody here but my sister and my Grandma, and Grandma’s sick,” Darcy answered.

“All right,” the officer said. “Just take it easy. ”

Darcy watched the heavy man get out of the car again. He shuffled to the corner under a bright street light. Darcy remembered her father sprinting across a field after a baseball, as fast as a teenager. It couldn’t be him, she told herself. Her father took such pride in his body, in keeping fit. He used to work out at the gym and brag about wearing the same clothes size he did as a teenager. “My Daddy got fat and then he got old,”Darcy remembered her father saying with a sharp laugh. “I’m not going that route. No way. ”

Now the man was standing directly under the light. For a moment he reminded Darcy of a pathetic, baggy-pants, twobit clown caught in the footlights of a cheap theater. The man removed his baseball cap, revealing short gray hair, like the stiff bristle of stubby dead grass at the end of the summer.

Darcy’s father had black hair, as black as the shiny surface of the black Mercedes he dreamed of and never got. Dad’s skin was smooth as a just-ripe plum. This man had a pouchy face, like a balloon with most of the air leaked out. He had dark circles under his eyes. His whole body sagged like a partially-full garbage bag with the load shifting towards the bottom.

But the more she looked, the more Darcy saw something familiar in the man’s face. “It’s him. It’s my father,” she whispered.

“Well, what would you like for us to do, miss?” the officer asked, after radioing his partner that the man could return to his car.

“Tell him to go away, please,” Darcy said. “Just tell him to go away. ” Tears blinded Darcy, and her shoulders shook.

“He said he was trying to work up enough courage to contact you. You don’t want to talk to him—is that right?” the officer asked.

“Just tell him to leave us alone,” Darcy sobbed.

“All right then. We’ll advise him that he runs the risk of being arrested for stalking if he bothers you anymore. Would you like a restraining order?”

“What’s that?”