My father’s death came at me from out of the blue like a peculiar and deadly snap of the fingers. One day he pulled me high on the swing, his arms stretched so I was above his head, singing, “Fly, Sky. Fly,” and pushed hard so I could reach for a cloud with my toes. I saw the glint of the sun on his hair, the flash of red and yellow leaves in trees blurred by my speed. Or have I nourished it so much, this last memory of my still-healthy father, that I added the trees I know so well from the park, when all there was, really, was the sight of the sky and the feel of the wind licking me as I soared?

The next day, he entered the hospital.

A week later, he was dead.

I was seven.

He was thirty-four.

Mom tried to explain that he was around me, and loving me. I watched her tongue tap her teeth and her lips move, but it didn’t make sense then.

It still doesn’t.

I was the only child in my class whose father was dead. The other kids ignored me as though it were contagious. I was the only kid I knew with a dead father until my freshman year of high school. Then, a kid’s dad died from a heart attack. He was absent from my algebra class for a week, which had the other kids whispering, and when he returned, he laughed at a joke as though things were ordinary. I knew that game because even as a seven-year-old I had played it. If you pretend things are ordinary, maybe for a few minutes they will be. And sometimes, sometimes, and this is both scary and exhilarating, it works.

And for a few minutes you forget you have a dead father. 3:45.

Anyway, I digress. I don’t know why I think about him every morning. I guess because his death was a startling change that twirled my life so it skipped to another path. Some things happen suddenly, and some you know are coming. Like death from cancer after a long battle. But for me, I didn’t even get to prepare myself, I didn’t have the time to be scared. It just happened.

Bang.

I wonder how my life would have been different if my father had lived.

Number one way: Tara wouldn’t be my sister.

I’d probably have a different sister. Or a brother.

Tara was an embarrassing kid and then a rebellious teenager. She was so different from me. I guess that partly comes from having different fathers.