Read Online The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family by Kathryn Trueblood - Free Book Online

for boat parts showed me his wallet’s worth of snap shots: wives and children strewn around the state like confetti.
    I want to know about man hurt—so I can identify it when I find my father—so I’ll know if any of his has to do with me. The vignettes of men in my mind don’t make sense as goodbye scenes, not really. They don’t carry the self-conscious poignancy of movies or novels, but they are a way for me to say goodbye now, each one a distillate of personality. A certain open-armed gesture, curls kinked with sweat at the back of a neck, squared off palms, thick eyebrows that tangled in my own until they looked like shredded wheat the morning after. In the end, the images are with me not as memories culled and kept, but like the imprint of shells on a bank of clay. This year, at twenty, I am a thousand years older, holding hunks of clay in my hands and examining the imprint of trilobites. There’s no salt smell here, but still, I dream of home. And there’s only one man that I miss.
    I see Nigel, the first time he pulled up at the hotel in his dark green Alfa Romeo. The girl with him is wearing a paisley scarf tied under her chin, the way women looked in 1950s French movies. I saw her as a girl even though I didn’t see myself as one—nineteen-years-old, pushing a towel cart across the parking lot. I think now that Nigel loved me in part because I could leave him; I have the strength for it. He probably already has a new sports car girl … one who will whine and wheedle when his affections stray, his attentions diminish. Always it’s a girl, though he’s nearly forty now. Yes, we girls are so hungry for the world, measured and poured in Nigel’s hands like medicine from a bottle, just the right dose, for just the right effect. But my mother raised me to believe that men weren’t there even when you thought they were—that was the moment most to beware of, most likely for them to disappear.
    Nigel has a hard incisive look; you wouldn’t want to have to ask him to repeat directions a second time. His eyes have the lines of a woodcut, angular, because the line of the lids extends beyond the actual eye. He has high color in a man’s way, blood in his cheeks but not a girl’s flush—the sign of arrogance in a man with an outwardly calm manner, restraint, not placidity.
    He has to unfold his long body like a beach chair in order to get out of the car. He takes the girl’s hand and she lets him lead her up the path to the motel office as though she wouldn’t have known where to go otherwise. The next morning, when I go to make up their beds, there are marks on the wall behind the bed posts where the plaster has given way. When I finish cleaning, I go to get some Dap and a spatula from the tool shed, to fill the divots in the wall. I see them coming in from the beach, heading for the car. He opens the door for her and as she slides into the seat, he straightens and looks at me. The look conducts a charge like metal; after the initial jolt, it begins to sting. I don’t turn away because I want to know why we recognize each other. In a dark room, I would recognize his breathing. That’s how I feel. He collects and catalogs hurt too, but it makes him angry at himself that he does it. Then they pull out of the lot and the girl turns her head to see who I am. Just the maid in a man’s flannel shirt. She knots the scarf under her neck.
    I’m alone in the office when he comes back the next weekend, by himself. He explains that he’s here meeting with potential investors for a fish farming operation, doing site evaluation.
    I’m unimpressed. “Do you want a room?” I ask as insolently as possible.
    He smiles, slow and wise and wan. “Yes, I can provide the girls myself. You don’t act the small town part, do you?”
    â€œI’m not from here, not entirely,” I say as I slide the forms across the