There were things that Emery considered about himself that he never really had the gravitas to bring up to other people. He thought he was a somber, introspective man, that he wasn’t sad because sadness was irrelevant, it wasn’t something that could be held in your hand, so, it wasn’t real, and with that happiness too was a casualty, irrelevant, trite. This is what he thought when his daughter would express concern for him, down in Missouri, all alone, living the simplest existence possible, avoiding everyone he could, in his small house, watching television but never even really watching it, never really paying attention to anything, slipping in and out of time, almost ethereal, shuffling along, never questioning what he was doing.

“I’m fine. I like it,” he would say.

You know how unhappy I would be if I worried about being happy, he thought.

Emery was aware that his daughter could see through his bullshit, but he was also aware enough that as long as he told her he was fine she wouldn’t bother him about it as much. One time his daughter had outlined this grand plan. She was going to land this job at some internet company just outside of New York and move there with Brian, her boyfriend (whom Emery had met once, and Carrie had been amazed that Emery had displayed an effort to be gracious and welcoming, and Brian regarded Emery with a sheepish sorry-I’m-fucking-your-daughter smile and weak handshake), and with the new money Brian and Carrie would settle down, buy a house, probably get engaged, and then Carrie told her father that he should move to New York too, at least upstate, on some property just as isolated, but somewhere where Carrie could take care of him, as she considered her mother to be a chiding, almost predatory influence (this mostly projection on her part) on her father, too concerned with herself to help him when his inevitable back surgeries finally came and he found himself bedridden for weeks, in which his sisters would bicker over who got to keep him on their couch, only for him to last two days before returning to the old recliner, bearing his problems on himself.

“If I piss myself, I piss myself,” he had told his sisters.

After Carrie detailed her elaborate plan to her father, one that hung on so many variables of jobs and relationships and money, she paused, waiting for a response. Emery sighed.

He said that country “well” that is almost musically strung out for three seconds, the kind of “well” that always means “nah, but thanks,” and then followed it with an “I don’t know about all that.”

The request made him smile, though. It was sweet. It was about the most youthful thing he had ever heard. His daughter was twenty-five now but the request might as well have been drawn with a crayon.