“Jojo,” he said. When he hugged her, he had knocked his baseball cap to the floor, and she bent to pick it up. Without it, she could see where his hair had become thinner, and she forced herself to look down at the cap. He was old. It had been hard to see before, but now she could see the age spots on his forehead, his already thin hair now brittle and gray. He held her by the arms and looked at her. “I’m so glad you’re here,” he said. “You have no idea how much I missed you.” Unlike her mother, he had held tightly to her when Matthew died, and for a long, long time she had tried to cling to that.

She knew her father loved her. When he returned from his business trips he would bring her back gifts—a piece of fossilized wood, a battery-operated cable car, a blue casino chip—and take her to a movie or the beach, but this affection always seemed to dissipate, and within a few days he was back in his office, answering two phones at the same time and gently shooing her over to the main house. She would refuse, sprawl face down across his desk, until he laughed and agreed to a quick game of hangman. Still, it had always been a desperate kind of love, too precarious. For years, she felt as if she were carefully binding the two of them together with fragile netting, and some morning she might wake up and find it snipped through.

“I missed you too,” she said.

“The house is a mess. I’m a mess. Everyone’s a mess.” He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose loudly. “I’m just glad you’re home.”

The word sounded strange. She hadn’t thought of their house as home for a very long time, but she nodded, took a deep breath, and followed her father into the parking lot.