Free Do You Know the Monkey Man? by Dori Hillestad Butler Page B

father-daughter connection. You’ll always recognize your dad’s voice because of that connection.”
    “I don’t know. I don’t think so,” Angela said. “Look, Sam. I don’t know whether this guy is your dad or not. But just because you’re father and daughter doesn’t mean you’re always connected. Sometimes connections get broken.”
    True. But that didn’t mean they had to stay broken.
    It was almost ten o’clock when Angela and I hung up. I knew my mom would be home soon. I would’ve thought that wherever my dad was, he would be getting home soon, too. I could picture him walking into his house. I didn’t know what he might look like now. I’d only seen that one picture of him, and it was really old. I imagined a man with really blond hair like mine pressing the message button on his answering machine. I could see the look of surprise on his face when he heard my voice, because of course he’d recognize my voice, too. I could see him replaying that message over and over again just to hear my voice. And I could see him checking a clock on the wall, wondering whether it was too late to call me back.
    It’s not.
I tried to send thought waves through the phone line.
Call me. Please call me.
    He never called that night.
    Or the next day.
    Or the day after that.
    And there were a million reasons why he wouldn’t have called. Reasons other than he just didn’t want to talk to me. One, he could have been on vacation. Two, he could have been working a lot. Three, maybe he worked nights and slept during the day. That would make it awfully hard to find a good time to call me back.
    Right?
    It was also possible he had a new wife who had gotten the message and erased it before he’d even heard it. Even if he was perfectly happy to hear from me, a new wife might not be so happy about it. Now that I really thought about it, I probably shouldn’t have left a message like that.
    Or maybe there was another reason. Maybe he was afraid my mom would answer the phone.
    After three days, I figured it was okay to try him again. But what if he really didn’t want to talk to me? What if he didn’t care about me at all? I couldn’t deal with that possibility, so I decided to hold off a couple more days. We were coming up on the weekend. Surely he’d call during the weekend.
    But on Saturday Mom had a huge list of things she wanted to do. First she wanted to pick up the wedding invitations. Then she wanted to stop in at the bakery, the florist, and Xavier’s, the place where she and Bob were having the wedding reception, just to make sure everything was set. She also had an appointment at Julianne’s for her final dress fitting and then she was hoping to meet with the minister to make her final music selections. She and Bob’s mother had the whole day planned out, and they wanted to drag me along for all of it.
    I hesitated. “I don’t know.” I was sure my dad was going to call that day and I didn’t want to miss him. Sure, I could bring my cell phone along, but I couldn’t exactly talk to him in front of my mom.
    “Sam, taking care of these last-minute wedding details is supposed to be fun. I would’ve thought you’d want to come along.” Mom sounded hurt.
    “Fine,” I said with a heavy sigh. “I’ll go.” It wasn’t like I had a choice anyway. So when my mom wasn’t looking, I set my phone to vibrate and shoved it in my shorts pocket. At least I’d know whether my dad called or not. Then she and I headed out.
    We stopped to pick up Bob’s mother first. “Oh, I’m so glad you girls invited me along!” she said as she hopped into the front seat. “We’re going to have such a nice day.”
    Yeah, real nice.
    Then the two of them started talking about how close the wedding was and how it was finally going to happen. I just sat in the back with my hand resting on my cell phone and watched the world go by.
    We stopped at the florist first. Everything was in order there. Then we stopped at the bakery.