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all she has to keep herself safe. My father identifies the dire triangle that my grandmother, my mother, and I form. He says that I protect my mother against her mother, that she passively protects me by offering one generation’s distance, and that my grandmother manipulates the two of us, playing one daughter’s insecurities off against the other’s. He disarms me by naming this triangle even as he steps in to break it by forming a new one, my mother, my father, and me. My father takes the place of my grandmother, one despot steps in for another. Astonished by his honesty, his perceptivity, I somehow miss what I don’t want to see that my father himself is selfish, a narcissist, dangerous. While he talks, he sits in his unlit office, feet propped on the desk he describes the scene for me. I lie curled on my bed, the lights out in my room. In those long hours of dark conversation, we fill in twenty years of history, we interrupt ourselves and each other to say over and over how unbearable is our separation. We say we are both bewildered and even frightened by the force of our feelings yet how can we stand to remain apart as we have been for so long? His voice fills the darkness. Nothing like this has ever happened to him before, my father says. His church, his wife, his other children, he tells me he doesn’t pay any more attention to them than I do to the rest of my life.
    He is pushing them away even as I withdraw from my family, my friends, my boyfriend, breaking dates, not answering the phone or knocks at my door. He understands why I’ve stopped out of school.
    He even applauds it. His only worry is that it will set my grandparents against him, against us, that they will prevent our becoming a part of each other’s lives. “But we’ll face that, ” he says. “Every one will have to understand that for now I am your school. I am what you have to learn. ” I’m excited by my father’s desire to tell me everything about himself How could I be otherwise, child as I am of a father who vanished and a mother so cool and withholding that she left me no means of contacting her when she moved out? “I have to see you again, ” he says each night on the phone. “I have to figure out a way to see you again soon. I can’t wait much longer. ” Then, one night, he calls to say he has a plane ticket. His church will sponsor a trip to the university, where he’ll meet with a professor of religion. The money comes out of a fund for the pastor’s continuing education. He’ll be with me in two weeks. Before my father arrives, I go home to explain why I’ve stopped out of school. My grandparents make the connection, as soon as my father reappears, I begin to mismanage my life. “Drop out! ” they protest. “How can you! Why? “
    “Stop out, not drop out, ” I correct, but this distinction is lost on them. Do my grandparents disapprove of my father’s returning for another visit because they suspect that he might be angry enough to be vengeful?
    Are they frightened that he’s coming back because he is at last strong enough to settle the score? To reclaim or destroy all that was his? “You don’t even know him! ” my grandmother cries, livid when I tell her that I want to see him again. “He’s never even been a father to you! ” she says. “But that’s exactly why seeing him has been such a shock. It’s why I need to see him again. Why I need to take a break. I need to know who he is. ” I cannot answer my grandmother’s questions about so sudden an attachment, my willingness to love a person I don’t even know. It’s a question I can’t answer for myself. “I swear I’ll go back in September, ” I say, and I assure her that having entered college with advanced placement credits and having taken the maximum course load every quarter, I’ll still be able to graduate with my class. “Have I ever broken a promise before? ” I ask. My grandfather shakes his head with the same disgust he reserves