Free Must Love Otters by Eliza Gordon

…”
    “In, like, four months.” I slide out and collect our sticky plates.
    “Still. Can’t a father treat his daughter? I figured you could use some time away.”
    “Your timing is perfect.” I kiss the top of his head. His thinning hair smells like the hospital.
    “When you thinking about going?”
    “Actually … tomorrow.”
    “Yeah?” He beams.
    “Yeah,” I say. An excited giggle escapes as the bubbles froth in the dishwater.
    “Wonderful!” Dad smooches my cheek before burying his hands in the suds. He washes; I dry and stack. “Any more thought about going back to school?”
    This is the only problem with coming to see my father. The questions. So. Many. Questions. “I’m not going to become a nurse.”
    “You get over the sight-of-blood thing, Hols.”
    “No. I won’t.”
    “Listen to me,” he says, using the soapy sponge like a magic wand he can use to transform his daughter into something better. “Without a union or an MBA, and now without Keith to help with the rent … You don’t have an endless amount of years to think about this stuff. You could go back, finish your degree. If you get into hospice care, the wages are incredible and our union is strong, great benefits, paid holidays—”
    “DAD.” The remnants of the hangover headache pops a button in my head.
    “Right.” He flops the wet towel over the oven handle.
    “Show me the boxes.”
    “Nah, it’s all right. I already moved them.”
    “You’re not supposed to be lifting.”
    “I had the neighbor kid help me. He’s saving for a video game player. Was more than happy to take my fifty bucks. Come here, though. I found this.”
    I follow him into the dining room and he slides a box to me. It’s full of my stuff. Soccer trophies, my scrapbooks from the trips we used to take to the Oregon Coast every summer, a dried-out, crumbling Dungeness crab claw, a framed photo under broken glass of me feeding an otter at the Monterey Bay Aquarium infirmary on my tenth birthday, a paper bag of unfocused, fading photos from the year I went to summer camp for children from single-parent homes (thanks, YMCA, for reminding us that more than half will end up pregnant before graduation and the other half will likely become drug dealers or worse, insurance salesmen). A pink hospital-issued Baby’s Book with only a few entries in it. How much I weighed. The date and time I was born. A single curl trimmed from my goldilocks under aged scotch tape.
    Mother Dear left us pretty soon after I was born—as in, bought a Greyhound ticket and left, not she left us too soon to go to the big all-night kegger in the sky . As my dad always says, “Some fish just aren’t meant to be caught.”
    The blankness of the lines next to “Baby’s Firsts” tell me that Dad was probably too busy learning how to bottle-feed and diaper-change and still hold down a job on three hours’ sleep. Man, I never even thought about it, how much of himself he gave just to be there for me. Never missed a game, never missed a school play or awards ceremony, never missed an opportunity to chaperone a school dance just to make sure wandering prepubescent hands didn’t find their way onto my ass. Makes the best oatmeal chocolate chip cookies but says he will only share his secret ingredient once I give him his first grandchild. He might die before that happens. Refer to aforementioned conversation.
    Wow. My childhood is in this box.
    “Thanks, Daddy.”
    He hugs me. “You will always be my best girl, you know …”
    God, I do not want to get emotional right now. No tears no tears no tears .
    Dad clears his throat and chunks his hand down on my shoulder a few times. We’re manly men. No time for blubbering.
    I suck back the moisture and excuse myself into the bathroom in search of ibuprofen. Inside the medicine cabinet, I find his cholesterol pills that, of course, I have to count to make sure he has indeed been taking them. Judging by the remaining pills and date on the