“No, no,” Darcy said quickly, “Grandma is okay. She’s sleeping. It’s that Dad is back in town. ”

Mom grabbed a chair and sat down quickly. “Your father came here?”

“He was sitting in a car across the street. I got scared. He’s been following me for days. I didn’t recognize him, so I called the police, and they told me it was him,” Darcy explained.

“Merciful Lord, after all these years,” Mom cried, clasping her arms tightly and rocking back and forth as if in grief.

“I told the police to tell him to go away and leave us alone,” Darcy said. “But he left this. It’s his phone number. ” Darcy showed her mother the scrap of paper, then put it on the kitchen counter.

“You want to see him, Mom?” Jamee asked.

“Oh, my head is spinning from all this, honey. I’m so tired. I just want to shower and go to bed. I need to let this sink in. I just can’t believe it. Tomorrow is a school day, so you girls got to go to bed too. ”

Looking dazed, Mom got up and walked toward the bathroom. Later on, when Mom was in her bedroom, Darcy heard her weeping. She knew Mom was trying to muffle the sounds by burying her face in the pillow. But just as they did years earlier when Dad abandoned the family, the racking sobs bubbled through the darkness.

At breakfast the next morning, Mom kept repeating to the girls that she could not believe their father came back without even calling or sending a letter.

“He’s a low-life,” said Jamee.

“Mom, he doesn’t even look like himself anymore,” Darcy said. “He’s so overweight and so . . . old, like he hasn’t taken care of himself in a long time. ”

Mom drank her coffee, her eyes welling with sorrow.

Darcy kept thinking about the past as she walked to school. When she had been very small, her father had made shadow puppets on the wall with his hands. He would make a snapping alligator with one hand and a hopping pig with the other. Every night the two creatures would race across the wall of the girls’ bedroom while their father recited a silly rhyme.

“Hot diggety dog, gonna eat that

hog,”

Says the old gator who looked like

a log.

“Hot diggety dee, he can’t catch

me,”

Says the roly-poly little piggy, who

hopped up the tree.

Darcy and Jamee would chuckle with glee as the shadow pig always leaped away from the snapping jaws of the alligator.