The hot dog men are stuck in the year’s first snow, their tires struggling up over dirty plowed dog-pissed piles they melt with water from their bins and stomp on with the sandals they wear with socks. They knot their heads in scarves like women, the fringed ends flapping like wattles by their chins as they push and push their way up the avenue. A strong wind comes and they shield their eyes from the blowing snow with half-gloves and uncovered fingertips. I’d look for John but he is any of these men in a woolen shapeless dark coat and the scarf on the head and a hot dog cart whose steam rises upward from its bins, quickly mixing with the falling snow.

“You can forget him,” our mother says, meaning our father. She is knuckling a rhythm with her hand turned over on the table and rapping one knuckle after the other. The hand twists and curls from side to side and the rhythm is flamenco. We would like to forget him, wouldn’t we? A lap never sat on. His shirt buttons never played with, never pushed to make him a tiger, a bear, a monkey, a cow. Mickey Mouse never drawn. Shoulders never ridden, a neck never squeezed tight between playground-dirty, smeary sticky stick-thin little daughters’ legs. A hand never held through a strawberry patch, red never creeping up the sneaker’s sides, the seeds collecting in canvas tongues, leaves clogging eyelets, weaving under lace’s weave, never, not ever, our father was it, just a tall man whose hand we held, the hand the right height for holding the wrong tall man’s hand.

We are called about Spain.

“Malaga maybe,” the cop says over the phone. “We’ve got a restaurant credit card receipt with what looks like his John Hancock.” Are we familiar with parts of southern Spain? he asks. Not us, but our mother is. “Tell him once as a girl, but what’s it to anybody now?” she says. “Their father’s not at the beach, his bald head blisters in the sun. He even burns through window glass,” our mother tells the cop.

“This includes another region now,” the cop says. “You may also get calls from federals hereon.”

School is steamy. The building warming the wool of our soggy mittens and hats and coats, wet from snowball making and snowball fights. We can hear the snow melting, dripping on closet floors, puddling out from the doors. Everything seems to be seeping out. Lunch can be smelled from first floor up to fourth. The odor of fish cakes, spawning its way up the up and down stairs to our rooms. The perfumes of teachers reaching seated pupils, spreading through the air from their slight exertions, the use of pointers, page turning and the rolling down of foreign countries’ maps. Something crackly from the loudspeakers. Holiday music played so low between first bell and late bell it could be mistaken for the constant hum of private thoughts. I wait to be called. I think it will happen someday, some monitor with a piece of paper in hand for one of my teachers will have my name on it. I’ll be sent down to the offices, handed the phone, my father will talk and I’ll listen, static carried over the overseas lines and a slight delay clues to his distance. He’ll say I’m to go to the airport, catch a plane to the south of Spain. We’ll drink wine poured down our mouths in bars and bed ourselves in small boats on rocky moonlit beaches. We’ll tell each other stories before sleep from our hard wood boat bottoms, then dream, safely down, the curving boatsides’ briny ribcages shelters from North African winds.

Rena comes home rattling after Christmas break. Small shell bracelets reach up past elbows on each arm and earrings of small clustered periwinkles hang from her ears and coral necklaces with red branches jab at her neck. She looks like what fishermen don’t want after hours spent cutting debris out of their nets. Rena weaves the shells through her long hair.

“You’ve been home already long enough, put your shells in boxes. Your tan is fading,” Bonnie tells her and she arranges Rena’s hair so that it covers her ears instead of being held behind.

Rena makes bracelets for the boys who love her. She strings a small clam shell on a strip of leather cord. The boys knot them at their wrists, wear them in their baths and the cords loosen and darken.

“Baby,” she tells me, “I’m going back to live there.”

“When?” I ask.

“Soon. My father wants me there. He says he’ll send for me. He’s sent me letters,” she says. She shows me the letters. There are a lot of them, all in a stack.

“Aren’t the stamps beautiful?” Rena says, but what I think is beautiful is how her father starts the letters. They all begin with “Cariña” or “Mi Amor.” Sometimes he draws pictures in the margins of his pages. They are drawings of sunsets and beaches and palm trees and he has even drawn Rena and himself standing on a beach, and in the drawing he is holding her hand.