I did not ask why he left twenty-three years ago.

He didn’t tell me where he’d been.

I’d been looking for him off and on for about ten years, not sure what I expected or if he was even alive. But I wanted to find my father even if I never found a dad.

I thought a lot about what I’d say if I did find him—internal dialogues a constant background music to my teen years. I went through every scenario before graduating high school. I knew what to say if he accepted me, denied me, ignored me; I even knew what to say at his funeral. I was a thesaurus of angry words, witty remarks, biting accusations, and loving benevolence. But nothing prepared me for what was to come.

By my thirtieth birthday I wanted only to offer forgiveness and let him know we all turned out all right. At least that’s what I hoped. Some part of me feared the questions, answers, anger of all those years—years that formed such a huge part of my identity. I was abandoned by my father. I’d told a hundred people in a hundred ways. Classrooms, offices, bars, bedrooms, everyone who knew me knew what I was, and I felt comfortable in my role. Unwanted. Forgotten. Fatherless.

Then at the urging of my boss, I filled out a Salvation Army missing family member form a few weeks before Christmas. What the hell. It couldn’t hurt. I’d tried a dozen other avenues. I didn’t even think about it after I mailed in the form. But when the call came to my office in mid-January I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. I had to leave for the rest of the day.

The woman from the Salvation Army told me my father had suffered brain damage from drug and alcohol abuse and that he might not remember me. But he was living with his brother George, and George’s wife Wendy, and they were taking care of him. She said George thought it was very important that I call and we talk. George. I vaguely remembered a man giving us bowls of boiled peanuts, but I wasn’t sure if that was him or someone else, or maybe a movie I’d seen.

I sat at home the rest of that day, looking at the phone, searching my history of dialogues to see if I had any that addressed the possibility of my father not remembering me. No, this was a new one.

I spent the next few days rehearsing new dialogues, testing anger, love and confusion, but the emotions felt either too large or too small. There was no way to prepare.

Four days after learning my father was alive, I sat in my living room, hands shaking, and dialed a Florida phone number.

When Wendy answered I had no idea what to say. I’d prepared no remarks for her. Should I introduce myself to this woman I’d never met? Explain how my father left when I was seven without a word, a warning, a hint? Should I tell her how my mom struggled with two jobs and three kids when her dream marriage came to an abrupt end after ten years? Or about my little sister’s adolescent fantasy of a daddy on a white horse coming to whisk her away?

“Uh, hi. Can I speak to George Townsend?”

“Just a moment.” She had a pleasant southern accent. Then I remembered that my father’s family came from the south. But there were no accents in my childhood. The Navy must have gotten rid of my father’s.

“Hello, this is George.” Even more southern, strong. A voice with hills.

“Oh. Hello. Um, this is Cindie Geddes. Townsend. Used to be Townsend. I got married.”

Silence.

“Cliff’s daughter. His oldest daughter.”

More silence.

Then a voice thick with emotion and smooth as meadow grass. “Cindie. Yes. I’m so glad you called. Your daddy will love to talk to you.”

My daddy. Yes, he had been Daddy once. The kind of daddy who took us skinny-dipping in the hot springs and helped us pick wildflowers for my mom. A laughing man who showered me with attention and made me feel like the beautiful center of a universe filled with wild creatures and natural mysteries. A hippy who saw the irony of working at the mine and had the sense of humor to name his daughter Clementine. (Thank God my mom insisted it be my middle name.) A man who made homelessness seem like a fun vacation when we spent months driving across the country as he searched for a job. A man who showed me the world through the porthole of a primer gray van.

“Ya’ there?” George asked.

“Yeah, thanks. How is he?” Might as well know what I was in for.

“Well, the drugs and such have caught up to him. But he’s been clean for five years now. Since he’s been with us. And it’s mostly places he has troubles with. He gets lost easy. But when I asked if he wanted to talk to y’all, he just walked around going, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’”

George told me how lucky my father was to have a forgiving daughter, and how sorry he and the whole family felt for what my father did to my mom. He told me they loved me and always would, because we were family.

Family. My mom, my sister, my brother—they were family. But wasn’t that exactly what I was looking for? A sense of family? A connection to people I once knew, a lifetime ago?

“Thanks,” I told him. “That means a lot to me.” The truth.

“I’ll go get your daddy.”

The smell of rabbitbrush came to me as I waited. The smell of my childhood. When I was a kid, I found a plain glass bottle, no bigger than my thumb, in the remains of a burnt-out trailer across the field from our place. I decided to bottle some magic and searched for the right elixir. The next time it rained, I filled the still smoky bottle with rabbitbrush and rainwater and created my own perfume. The scent meant spring to me.

“Hello?” His voice was different from the one I expected.

“Hi. It’s Cindie. Um, George said he told you I was going to call.”

“Yup. He surely did.” His voice was southern now, thick southern, slow and sweet with recognition.

“Jeez, ” I laughed—a nervous titter. “Where did that accent come from?”

“Don’t rightly know. Maybe from George. I had it before too, I think.”

I nodded, forgetting he couldn’t see me, letting the silence grow and grow until I was afraid it might eat us both up. “So.”

“So.”

“How you been?” I asked, feeling even as the words left my tongue the brutal banality of the question.

“Good. And you?”

And me. How had I been for twenty-three years? I wanted to yell at him then. I wanted to tell him of the years my mom struggled, of the terrible taste of government cheese, of moving from school to school. I wanted to blame him for abuses and disappointments without number, to scream and cry and make him feel all I had. But would he understand? Would he even remember my words tomorrow? And would it change anything?

Instead I told him about my husband of ten years, of high school and college. I told him I work as a biologist and we both laughed at the fact that I now work in mining reclamation.

We laughed and the anger was pushed aside by memory. I remembered that it was my father who had made me feel the spirituality in nature, the amazing humbling wonders of the desert.

I told him about my brother’s two kids, my sister the nurse. “You ever remarry?” I asked. “Have any other kids?”

I liked to imagine that he had never contacted us because he had gotten his life together and had a new family.

“Nope. Not that I recall.” He paused, obviously thinking back. “There was this one woman. She had a kid. But I don’t think I ever married her.”

Again, I nodded, this time smiling.

He said, “I’m still not a bad looking guy, y’ know.”

“I believe that. I remember a very handsome man with blue eyes and brown hair. A sort of cross between Elvis and Clint Eastwood.” And suddenly I did remember. I hadn’t seen a picture of him since I was a freshman in high school, but I could see it now—him sitting on a couch in a trailer, a little girl’s arms thrown around his neck, his cowboy hat tilted on her small, blonde head. Both of us were smiling and the resemblance was remarkable. I’d always been told I looked like him.

“What do you remember?” I asked, half afraid he’d remember nothing of our seven years together.

“Oh, I reckon I remember Crescent Valley and camping and a trip to Yosemite. And Princess. She was a damn good dog.”

“Best ever,” I agreed. “Remember how she used to kill snakes?”

“Picked them up by the tail and whipped ‘em around ‘til their head hit a rock. Smartest dog I ever knew.” He laughed and the sound wiped away my living room and took me to a backyard of dirt and sagebrush, Indian ricegrass and light pink phlox. Thin fishbone clouds floated so high above the textured hills that we didn’t even notice them. An all-consuming desert sun turned our shoulders pink, our shirts long since discarded. Princess watched over us as Cliffy built the city, Kiki lined our roads with lupine, and I directed all the construction.

Then came a pillar of shade from strong, tanned legs and I was lifted into the air. “Daddy, Daddy, higher!” and then my brother and sister demanding their turns, and my daddy’s laughter.

“Yeah,” I told him. “She was a great dog. But she died a few years ago when I was in college. Old age. Nice and quiet.”

I told him about the mining reclamation laws in Nevada and how I actually had worked on a project at the mine where he worked when I was a kid.

“Glad to hear that,” he told me. “The desert is too pretty to tear up and leave.”

I remembered sitting on my daddy’s lap and steering a giant haul truck. I saw his hands way down at the bottom of the black steering wheel and I saw myself smiling proudly, letting him think he steered the thing by himself.

We sat in silence for a while, knowing the conversation had run its course, but unsure how to end it.

“Well,” I said.

“Well,” he drawled.

“It was nice to talk to you again.”

He was supposed to say, “You too,” and then I’d hold the phone until I heard the dial tone.

Instead he said, “I have more to say. A lot more. I can’t think of it all right now. But I don’t want you to think I don’t want to talk to y’all. I do.”

“We’ll talk again,” I told him. “I have your number. George has mine.”

” “Let’s keep in touch,” he said.

“Yeah. Let’s.” I said and swiped at my eyes.

Afterwards, talking to my mom and reliving our conversation, I realized how much we’d said in those silences, how much my father said in those last few seconds. Twenty-three years and all the same things still bound us one to the other. The love of a good dog, the scars on the desert, the weeds and the wildflowers, the rivers and the trails. The smell of rabbitbrush and rainwater.