My father had been a presence in my life in the daily sense. Not because we saw each other often, but because the Sunday calls and the texts and the late-night conversations had given him a consistent presence in my week. When he stopped being a presence in my week, the week had a different shape. I kept reaching for that shape and finding it wasn’t there.
On Monday evening, the night before the reading, I’d gone out and walked for an hour because I couldn’t sleep and the hotel room had become oppressive. The neighborhood around the hotel was ordinary — restaurants, a pharmacy, a dry cleaner with a cheerful sign in the window. The city that had been my childhood was at the edge of all of it but not right there, not where I was walking.
I thought about my father walking these streets for thirty years after I’d left. The city had been his in a way it wasn’t mine anymore. I tried to imagine what that looked like — the grocery runs, the cardiologist’s office, the morning walks he’d told me about on the Sunday calls. I couldn’t quite get there. You can know about someone’s life and not be able to fully picture it.
The next evening I’d be in his living room counting page numbers. I didn’t know that yet. I was just walking, in the dark, in my father’s city, missing him in the straightforward way that comes before anything complicated intervenes.
## The Professional