Last night before dinner there was a knock on the door. Pina and I were not expecting anybody, and unexpected visitors are truly a thing of the past. We were sipping Negronis out on the deck. Smoke from the fires had blown east and the air quality, at least according to our phones was rated as Good. Neither of us wanted to answer the door. The knock came again. I stood up and put on a mask.

“You don’t have to answer it,” Pina said. “It’s probably a Jehovah’s Witness. Nothing stops them.”

But by then I was curious. I pulled the door open and stood back in one motion, a maneuver I’ve perfected over the last months when deliveries have come. And there stood Sally, my beautiful daughter, mask less, and forcing a sad gap-toothed smile. I wanted to hug her but knew better.

And there stood Sally, my beautiful daughter,

mask less, and forcing a sad gap-toothed smile.

I wanted to hug her but knew better.

“What are you doing here?” I said instead.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in, Dad?”

I stood on my spot for a minute. “I can’t. I have my friend, Pina, here. We’re in the midst of a pandemic.”

“Did you forget that I live in the middle of nowhere? I haven’t seen anybody except Alger for ages.”

“Don’t you have a mask? What happened to all the masks I sent you?”

“They aren’t necessary where I live, but they’re beautiful, Dad. We hung them across the living room wall.”

“Well, you’ll need a mask down here.”

Sally, dressed in faded jeans and an embroidered peasant tunic, nodded and then shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She wore the same exasperated expression I remember from her teen years, but it’s been a good ten years since she was a teen. Her backpack hung from her right shoulder and she gave it a boost to keep it from slipping down her arm.

“Stay here,” I said. “Let me explain things to Pina.”

Pina was remarkably magnanimous. “Of course, have her come in. She’s your daughter. I look forward to meeting her. We’ll keep our distance.”

“But, we don’t know where she’s been.”

“Didn’t you say she lives on the Lost Coast?” Pina said, as if this fact carried immunity with it.

I brought Sally a fresh mask in a baggie and a small bottle of hand sanitizer. “Here, put this on and don’t touch anything when you come in.”

Sally sneered at me before putting on the mask, which I made from a fabric                 that featured oversized black polka dots, giving her visage a clownish aspect. As she walked in, Sally stuck her hands in the air as if she were under arrest.

“And don’t be a smartass,” I said, just to insure, I suppose, that she’d be a smartass. I wanted Pina to see my daughter as she is, although she’d become a mystery to me years ago.

After I offered the whole liquor cabinet, Sally asked for a beer. Pina sat bright-eyed in the goldenrod director’s chair with her second Negroni. I stood beside my pygmy Meyer lemon tree, and Sally slouched in the faded forest green chair after pulling a joint from a zippered pocket at the top of her pack.

“So you’re Pina. My dad told me all about you, but I don’t remember a thing he said. I’ve been under a lot of stress.”

So you’re Pina. My dad told me all about you,

but I don’t remember a thing he said.

I craned my neck toward Sally to see if I could make her recoil. “So what’s been going on?”

She dodged my question. “Did you tell me how pretty Pina was?”

“I don’t remember what I told you.”

“See,” Sally said, “it runs in our family. Nobody remembers anything.”

“I don’t remember anything either,” Pina said. “But that may be my drinking. There’s no hope for me, Sally. You mind if I join you?” Pina fished around in the pocket of her white camp shirt and pulled out a doob. “The only creature that remembers anything around here is your father’s damn parrot.”

“Ba dum ching!” Sally sat up straight and, before lighting her joint, softened it between the flat of her hands. Pina lit hers directly. They each took long tokes and exhaled through their nostrils, sorority sisters from the start. I pulled out another director’s chair and decided to enjoy my irrelevance.

“You’re lucky you weren’t around for my dad’s hamster days.” Sally said, sinking back into a deep slouch.

“His hamster days.”

“Yeah, I was a six-year-old kid who wanted a hamster and the next thing I knew my dad founded a colony of them. He built an enormous cage on a platform in our basement and constructed elaborate Ferris wheels, slides, and spinning disks. We called it the hamster circus.”

Pina smiled and passed me her joint. “Your father is an inspired man.”

“I guess so,” Sally allowed, “but weird.”

I relit the joint, which had gone out.

“Nice to see you smoking, Dad. I can tell that Pina’s been a good influence on you.”

Pina laughed so hard that she ended up with the hiccups. I have to say the smoke relaxed me. I hadn’t smoked for years before Pina came on the scene. It used to make me paranoid; now, I assumed, I was too old for paranoia.

Meanwhile Sally looked like she’d gotten comfortable on the deck. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop but I decided to let her lay her cards on the table when she wanted. Reckless, no doubt, Pina and I decided to bond with her, when she claimed she’d not been physically in the world with anybody for three weeks, since Alger left on a trip. She’d stopped working for the cannabis company up the road from her place, early in the pandemic. She lived off her garden, all that she’d pickled and canned, and the treasures in her freezer.

“We haven’t been with anybody either,” Pina said. “Just keeping each other company.”

Pina was ready to do the bonding thing before me, but Sally was my daughter. May as well live and die with your own.

“You must be careful,” I admonished. “If you’re going to stay here at all, you can’t be hanging out with other people. “Don’t forget, Sally, we’re old people.”

“I’ve become a recluse after all the years on the Lost Coast. I haven’t hung out with people for a long time.”

“Let’s be safe,” I said. “We wear our masks when we’re not eating or drinking or smoking. And we keep our distance.”

We had dinner out on the deck. Pina made a tasty mushroom and herb omelet and I tossed a salad of little gems. Sally looked truly happy for the first time since she arrived and preceded to air every grievance she had about growing up with me as her father: forcing her to eat her Brussels sprouts and making her clean her room every week if she wanted to get her allowance. “I mean, it was like five dollars a week, so there wasn’t a whole lot of incentive. I felt like I lived in a debtor ‘s prison.”

“Do you think I should have raised your allowance when you didn’t clean your room very often?”

Sally stuck out her tongue at me. But after that, to my surprise, most of her complaints were tepid and taken together they created the portrait of a man who, despite being eccentric, was not without his charms.

Pina seemed to revel in all the stories about me as a dad, especially the ones about my taking Sally every Sunday to Ginsberg’s Galley, a poetry karaoke bar in Guerneville that evolved into a poetry church.

“What was that reverend’s name?” Sally asked.

“Bobby Sabbatini.”

“Right. Before Sabbatini saw the light and fell in love with poetry, he had been a police detective.”

“That’s what we need in these times,” Pina said, “more cops who love poetry.”

“Yeah, but those were weird people out there,” Sally said, rolling her eyes, “absolute river rats.”

I wondered if the good people along the Russian River were any weirder than the people Sally ran into on the Lost Coast.

“Every damn week we had to haul ass out to Guerneville, to listen to people recite poems. I think my dad had the idea he was giving me religion.”

“Every damn week we had to haul ass out to Guerneville,

to listen to people recite poems.”

“Hey, it was right after your mom left and, I admit, I was searching for something.”

“But all the way out to Guerneville,” Sally said.

“You were just pissed that nobody was reciting Shel Silverstein poems.”

Sally held up a finger to indicate that her mouth was full. I gazed at my lovely daughter and forgot for the moment where we were and what we were talking about. Sally doesn’t look much like me but she has a lot of her mother Arrosa’s Basque features: olive skin, deep-set brown eyes, and large lips, which frame a mouth that can open wide enough, it seems, to hold a small melon.

I remembered the first time I saw Arrosa, more than thirty years ago now, at the old Depot Café in Mill Valley. I was a student at College of Marin and she an au pair for a wealthy family in the hills, dressed like an American kid, on her day off. She smiled at me first, but when I smiled back she became coy. I felt proud of my persistence in getting her phone number, with complete instructions on when I could call and when not.

“They didn’t even have any Shel Silverstein poems on the karaoke machine,” Sally blurted. She faced Pina and explained: “It was kind of like an AA meeting—everybody got a few minutes to either recite a poem or read one from the karaoke dealie projected on a screen.”

I wondered if Sally had her own experience with AA meetings or only knew about them from the movies.

“I always thought that the people who recited poems from memory were superior,” she continued, “like deacons of the church.”

“Like your dad?” Pina asked.

“Yeah, he was always wailing some long-ass Yeats poem.”

“I’ll never forget the day you stood up and recited that Shel Silverstein poem. How old were you when you did that?”

“Eleven.”

“I was so proud of you.”

Sally’s expression turned solemn and then she stood from her chair in the corner of the deck, raised her head high and recited:

 

The voice
By Shel Silvertesin

There is a voice inside you
That whispers all day long.
“I feel this is right for me.”
“I know that this is wrong.”
No teacher, preacher, parent, friend
Or wise man can decide
What’s right for you—just listen to the voice
That speaks inside.

 

“Remember? Everybody in the café applauded after you recited that.”

“Yeah, and that’s when I got bashful. I didn’t think people in a church were supposed to clap.”

“It wasn’t a real church, Sally.”

“That’s not what you told me at the time.”

It took until midnight for Sally to tell us why she arrived, unannounced, at our door. There was only the smallest hint of smoke in the air, but it had finally turned cool. Pina and I put on another layer but Sally seemed impervious to the chill. I told her that I could set up a futon for her in the second bedroom. “I can bring Roscoe out to the living room in his cage.”

“Doesn’t he sleep through the night?” Sally asked.

“Yes, but he wakes up early and starts yammering.”

“I wake early, too. I’ll yammer with him.”

I couldn’t keep from laughing. Sally didn’t know what she was in for.

“Thank you guys for your graciousness,” she said. “I mean, for not bugging me about what I’m doing here and just letting me hang out.”

Sally took a moment to relight what was left of her joint.

After offering Pina a light, which she declined, Sally inhaled deeply and, instead of exhaling through her nostrils, used her wide lips to blow outsized smoke rings.

“So, Alger isn’t on a trip; he left me for this bitch Gail who runs the cannabis facility where I used to work and where he still works. I stopped going in April. I didn’t think it was safe. A lot of the crew seemed dubious to me. Nobody was wearing a mask. I didn’t like Alger coming home from work, maybe getting us both sick. Our place is small. I told him to stay somewhere else and that’s what he did. It’s been a long time now. He even took our dog, Skipper.”

I caught her eye. “Sal, I’m so sorry. You never tell me what’s going on with you.”

“I am now.”

That shut me up, and Sally was quiet for a moment. She stood and walked to the edge of the deck, looking out at the row of Osage orange trees, and then turned back.

“So what have you been doing all this time, Sally?”

“Living off the money you put in my account and getting high. Asking myself existential questions that I have no answers for. I knew I had to get out of there but I was paralyzed. I should have called you, dad. I’m not sure what I’m doing here, but I had to go somewhere. ” Sally sniffled once, but she did not cry; the joint still burned between her fingers. “Alger and I had been fighting for a long time. I couldn’t stand the isolation any more. He said I was just a big city girl and that you couldn’t take the city out of the girl. I don’t know about that. I think there is a lot of daylight between the city and the wilderness.

“On the Lost Coast you are so many miles away from everything but the pot farms and the ocean. So, staying all those months, I figured I’d either be cured of loneliness or die of it. But, of course, neither happened. I drove away just as lonely as ever, but definitely alive.”

“I’m glad you came here, Sal.” I wanted to hug her, to hold her close, but I knew better.

Sally snuffed out her joint. I watched her bite her lower lip, but I turned away before she started sobbing. It looked like a flood coming. As a young girl, Sally cried forever and then at around age ten, shortly after her mother left, she shut off the valve and stopped crying altogether. I can’t remember seeing her cry since.

Now her tears became contagious. This wasn’t the kind of contagion I was worried about. I rubbed my eyes and gazed over at Pina, who smiled back at me, sniffling.