“Chase me.” He kissed her. “I’m all the adventure you need.” He eased his hand down the elastic waistband of her pants and started to work his magic. Her back arched and, before she knew it, their mini argument was all but forgotten. Sweaty and relieved, they lay side by side. Poppy put her hand in front of the bare lightbulb in the lamp and waved her fingers around, casting shadows on the far wall. A rabbit, a fox, a bird. Animals in motion, running away. She remembered the game she and Ann and Michael used to play where they’d put all the animals together. What did they call it? Ani-something. Bird, rabbit, fox: a “babbitox.”

Poppy said, “So when you hung out with my dad, what did you guys talk about?” She couldn’t look at Brad when she asked. It was too hard; she was afraid she might start to cry.

“I don’t know, we shot the shit about a lot of stuff.”

She laughed. “He was good at talking about a lot of stuff.” She found a path in the hair on his chest, and ran the tip of her finger through it, along the dip in his sternum, over the gentle mound of his emerging beer belly. “Can you be more specific?”

“I don’t know. You know what he was like. He’d go off on music, politics. One minute he’d talk about colonizing Mars, the next he’d tell you about some show he liked on reality television. He liked to hang out at the shop. He’d pick up old bike parts and bring them to me and I’d weld them for him. He has an awesome bike. You should check it out. I saw it in the garage.”

“Sounds like you knew him pretty well.”

“Yeah, I guess. But he was also one of those guys that could talk your ear off about anything without talking much about himself.”

“Did he…” Poppy smiled, embarrassed. “Did he talk about me?”

“Sure. Yeah, sure he did.”

She drew back a long slug of beer, bracing herself for what Brad might say. “And?”

“And he thought you were great, of course.”

She pounded his shoulder. “Come on, what did he really say?”

“I think he wished you and Ann lived closer. He was a teacher, he spent his whole life devoted to kids, but his own were pretty far away.”

“Ouch.”

“I didn’t mean for that to sound bad. It’s OK. He understood. I think he admired you for being so independent, like your mom. He was probably even jealous of your freedom to move around. He said he kept track of you on a map in his classroom, did you know that? He put a pushpin in every place you ever lived. It made him proud.”

“I should have called more. I should have visited more often.”

“You were living your life.”