The next day I wished I were a wanderer, a rambler, a hobo out of an old song or a folk tale, nobody’s daughter. I wished I were not in our nation’s capital but out on the plains, or in some bleached-out motel on the Mexican side of the border. Instead I parked my dad’s car on Albemarle Street. I was returning the car and meant to return something else too.

The neighbors’ houses, stripped of their holiday lights, squatted grimly on hills of ivy. The steps to our own house needed hosing down. I didn’t want to go inside. Much as I understood that my failings and failures couldn’t be blamed on this house, I still felt as though it had sapped too much out of me and that I’d been hobbled by it. I bided my time in the car, the little gun in my purse.

Or was I just avoiding my father? His sudden outbursts, his unacknowledged, indescribable needs, his heavy heart—I didn’t know what to do with him.

No one answered the door, and I let myself in. “Hello? Dad?” I heard footsteps on the basement stairs and then there he was, stumbling up from underground in his rowing singlet, his face reddish and sweaty and suddenly too large, with too much of that damp skin on it.

“Hello!” he said.

“Hi. I brought the car back.”

“You didn’t have to—I could’ve come out on the Metro to get it.”

“That’s okay,” I said. I knew he would’ve done it, had I asked. “Thanks for lending it to me.”

There was a basket of clean laundry by the stairs, not yet folded. I still wasn’t used to it, his doing his own laundry. And out of nowhere I had the thought, He needs someone over here taking care of him, though it wasn’t the laundry that was the issue, he was perfectly capable of laundry, and there was nothing about that basket of clothes or about the house generally or the way he himself looked that suggested he needed any special help. Even so, I understood in that moment why it had bugged Courtney when I’d moved out.

“Are you sure you don’t need it for longer? You could keep it for the weekend.”

I shook my head.

“Let me clean up a little, and I’ll drive you back over.”

“You don’t need to—”

“I’m not busy.”

“Weren’t you exercising?”

“I was just finishing. Happy to drive you.”

The heaviness I’d been dreading beforehand was not present now: sometimes he was suffused with it and sometimes not at all. You never knew.

He went upstairs to rinse off and change, and I sat in the living room. I reached into my purse for a magazine and then remembered what else was in there. I had to give it to him. And what could I tell him? When he came down I pulled the pistol out of my bag and said, “I brought this back. I can’t have this.” And then: “It freaks me out to have it.”

“Oh,” he said. He looked at it, then shook his head very slightly, almost talking to himself. “If you can’t have it—”

“I can’t have it.”

“I’ll put it in the safe.” And up he went again, to his study, where he had a safe bolted to the wall behind his desk.

It was as though I were trying to unload not only the thing itself but some excess of maleness I’d been saddled with—because of my dad? Was it in trying to please him that I’d become more of a boy than was good for me? Or in trying to compensate for him? It was a subtle thing, for it’s not like anybody who met me would’ve found me especially masculine, but there was a way in which I tended to tamp down those parts of myself I found girly, preferring to stand around making wisecracks. Although I couldn’t really get rid of that by returning the gun, I felt better after I did.

I heard the phone ringing, then the toilet flushing, and so I went to answer the phone myself.

“Hello?”

“Hello?” echoed a woman’s voice, surprised. “Is—Tim there?”

“He’s not available just now. Who’s this?”

“It’s Valerie. Who’s this?”

“Helen,” I said, shortly.

“Ah. His daughter Helen?”

“Yes.”

“This is Valerie,” she said again. “If you wouldn’t mind telling him I called.”

“Sure.”

“Valerie called,” I told Dad when he came back. “Thanks,” was all he said in response. Then he clapped his hands and asked me was I ready to leave.

“Who is Valerie?”

“She’s the, uh, a woman who calls sometimes.”

“A woman who calls sometimes?”

“We’ve had dinner together.”

I couldn’t get any more out of him. I was glad to know there was a woman who called him, though as it sank in—the fact of these occasional calls and at least one dinner—I grew tense. Oh please! I scolded myself. For I knew what I was feeling and it was: abandoned. I let him drive me back. Mass Ave was deserted, nothing but dark buildings. More Washington arcana spilled out of Dad as he drove, and I let it wash over me, the sound of my dad when he was feeling good, or good enough.