I sip iced tea while she smokes. The straw fits my mouth like a cigarette, and I try hard not to remember the feel of a Camel between my lips, the suck and pull of the filter. From across the small table she tells me about internships, grad school, opportunity, pausing every few moments to blow smoke from the side of her mouth in sharp straight gusts. Expert. I remember that.
She is beautiful, my daughter. She looks a little like me, a lot like her mother, a honey-skinned memento of that long ago tryst. We are an unlikely pair, me with my soft gut and my cowboy hat and the mirrored sunglasses tucked into the neck of a plain blue T-shirt; she in her mini skirt and the thin fitted top with the straps that slip from her shoulders like a lover's caress when she bends to root in her slouchy bag for—what? A daytimer? A cellphone? What do women put in these bags? Where do they find so many things? This daughter who has burst into my life fully grown—where did she learn this arcana, when did she become a young woman?
She contacted me; she chose this place—"socially conscious, locally owned." She arranged for the hotel. As if I'd need help negotiating this town, her town, with its college, its cafe, its fresh-scrubbed youth. It would be easier if I was still smoking.
My daughter hands me a slip of paper, glances at her watch, smiles. When she crushes her cigarette and rises to go I follow her graceful lead, keenly aware of the paunch that slides over the top of my bronze belt buckle like risen dough, aware of the looks she attracts as she stands. Long looks. Speculative. Appraising. The way I looked at young women once. The thrust of her hip tells me she notices. I remind myself that I want this for her—for my daughter—to be self-assured, confident, comfortable in her skin.
She walks me to my rental car with the efficient disinterest of a cowboy leading a calf to its fate. I carry the piece of paper with her name and mine written in script. Permission. The sidewalks are crowded with the milling young, and I slip on the mirrored sunglasses that reflect to them their own fresh faces as they pass.
Tomorrow I will sit in the hot stands beside her mother and her mother's husband and I will watch my daughter graduate. Afterwards I will hug her, quick and hard, feel the thin bones beneath the skin, smell her scent, spring and smoke. Then I will let her go. It is her turn to ride the bucking future. To slip from the chute like energy incarnate. Freedom and jolt. I remember that, too.