WE MET THE FOLLOWING DAY AT A BAR IN NORTH PHILLY, NOT far from Temple University. It was sandwiched between a corner store selling lottery tickets and fried sausages and what appeared to be the long-standing rental residence of an out-of-work horticulturist. Shoestrings tied around a telephone wire ten feet above my head dangled a pair of pristine sneakers, which swayed over me like poisonous mistletoe. I stood beneath them looking from right to left, right to left, and back again, ensuring that I had the correct location. One hundred yards in one direction and college kids were learning the Rule Against Perpetuities and the Theory of Relativity. One hundred yards in the other, and some poor teenager would find a knife in his carotid artery because he failed to deliver the proper ounces of cocaine to a guy named Biff. BAR DIVE was painted in yellow letters on the marquee. You didn’t have to squint too hard to see remnants of the previous bar underneath in red, also called BAR DIVE, only in reverse—DIVE BAR. Ten feet above me, the sneakers twisted and turned in the spring breeze. A camera was resting under the shade of the awning that welcomed patrons inside. I barely noticed it, but as soon as I crossed the threshold, its lens closed in on me like a furtive spectator.
I walked in at precisely five thirty. Sun still painted the early evening sky and would for at least another hour. That was all the time I gave myself. One hour. After an hour, I would be back on the Broad Street Line to Center City before anyone could mistake me for either (a) a state school student, or (b) the culprit behind the missing drugs that the boy with the knife in his carotid artery would be hiding in his boxers.
The bar was dark, so it took a moment or two for my eyes to adjust. By the time they did, I recognized him instantly—not because he was the only white guy in the bar, but because he looked like me in the way I had always wanted to look like my mother. He was standing behind the bar, wiping the lip of a pint clean with a striped towel. I used to look at my mother’s face, studying each pore, each brow crescent, each unattached earlobe, and question my relation. No part of me was sculpted in her features. When I walked into Bar Dive, I realized why.
My father was probably a lot younger than he looked. Lines curved their way into his forehead, haphazardly, as if even Mother Nature wasn’t sure how to age him. In the dark room of the pub, the green of his eyes glowed. And just above, where his seemingly once-thick hair was starting to thin, I noticed the faint imprint of my hairline. Jagged and confused, a zigzag of hair traced the top of both of our heads from one ear to the other. I can’t explain why, but I never thought it was an attractive feature until that point.
“Noa?” he asked, looking up.
I nodded.
He wiped his hands on the same cloth that had dried the beer glasses, wineglasses, shot glasses, and wooden countertops moments earlier, and stalled, hesitating in his stance. An embrace would have been too much, to be sure, but a handshake, well, that would connote iciness, which I was sure he wanted to avoid. The door opened and closed with the ringing of a bell, and then, almost as if a director had slapped a clapboard, he turned and faced me.
“I’m so glad you came,” he said.
I sighed. “So, here I came.”
“Want something more private? Just for us, maybe?” he asked, sort of declarative, sort of inquisitive. Without awaiting a response, he walked down the bar, pulled up the wooden flap, pushed through it, dropped it, and then led me to a small table in the rear of the room, holding on to a bottle of water along the way.
“Is this okay?”
I nodded, hesitant.
“You sure?” he asked. His voice was gentle, almost as though he knew he wouldn’t have a lot of time with me. It hung on my body language with protection so that each time he validated my nerves, he was attractive, appealing, even.
“Uh-huh,” I said, agreeing. “It’s fine.”
It was darker in the back and substantially more private. There was a small window, cut into a tic-tac-toe panel just behind it. We would still be visible, if necessary. I could still be seen from outside, so I acquiesced.
“Can I get you a drink?”
I forced a smile to make him feel better, though I don’t know why. He was chasing me, after all. He had abandoned me. Not the other way round.
I shook my head. “No.”
“Something to eat?”
Again, no.
He ran his hands through his hair violently, shoving his scalp along with it. There was nothing else to offer. His breath was heavy, and I recognized it, not from the phone calls days before, but from my own chest when I was nervous, leaking out from my mouth every night before I fell asleep.
He held his hand to mine and opened himself outward for me to sit. It seemed as though he was still trying to remember the rules of chivalry—or whatever the rules of chivalry have been made to be when making amends with your long-lost progeny. It looked both exhausting and somewhat endearing on him at the same time. He tried to put his hand over mine. I flinched upon contact.
“So why the hang-ups?” I finally asked, getting comfortable. “You do realize that each and every phone call was an opening scene to Law & Order, don’t you?”
“Oh my god, Noa,” he said, looking down, embarrassed. “It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.”
“I’m not joking. I was this close to calling the police.” My fingers pinched a millimeter of space so that, from a certain angle, it looked like I was crushing his maudlin face, feigned abashed revelation or not. “People are freaked out about crossing the street next to someone strange, and you think it’s a good idea to pop into my life via anonymous telephone hang-up?”
Spills of nervous laughter trickled out in runs, in syncopation with the cadence of my voice. His face jumped in and out of view, and when he moved, for an instant, the light from the window highlighted the skin above his mouth. A thick scar, almost the size of a pea pod, rested over his upper lip.
“So?” I asked. “Are you going to answer my question?”
“I just wanted to meet you,” he said before taking a sip of water.
“Like that? It’s creepy,” I said. “Like, disturbingly creepy. You couldn’t have just sent me a letter? An e-mail? Had my mom warn me? Even just have said hello on the first call, at least?”
“I didn’t mean to sound creepy,” he said, defensively. “I really just wanted to meet you. Is that so hard to believe?”
I looked to the window and then back to him.
“A little, yeah. Especially like that.”
“I was nervous,” he said with a crooked smile that expropriated ninety-eight percent of my attention. Had I met him in a library or a coffeehouse, no doubt he would have appeared distinguished, perhaps even approachable, but in the putrid light of Bar Dive, his awkward smile was becoming distracting. “I was just nervous,” he said again. “That’s all.”
“It’s been twenty-three years,” I said. My voice was my mother’s when she discovered that pack of cigarettes under my pillow on my fourteenth birthday. “Why now?”
He cleared his throat in little couplets. Sitting across from me, he looked more hopeful than I could have imagined, given the circumstances.
“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging off the suggestion.
“Really?” I laughed. “That’s what you’ve been calling me to say? ‘I don’t know?’ Come on, Caleb. You can do better than that.”
“I just,” he stumbled again. He drank from his bottle of water and squinted, as if he didn’t know what words to put together next. “You know, Noa, there are things that happen in this world that make you really, really want to make things right.”
“Oh, Jesus. Not another one.” I sighed. “If I hear one more person talk about how life is precious right now, I’m gonna walk out of here.”
Of course, I didn’t. It’s not like I was spending that much time with people rethinking their lives in the last few months. It’s not like I missed out on his presence. My mother’s Lazy Susan of stand-ins did just fine. I rarely sat in bed pondering the missing half of my genetic tree, but perhaps, in hindsight, I was curious. And he was offering. And I was there.
“Everyone goes through a time when he realizes how much he screwed up. I guess, for me …” He paused, looking at his water bottle, contemplating his next string of words. “I guess for me it was my time in prison.”
My chest tightened. I don’t know why I was surprised. I don’t know why I was even upset. It wasn’t like I had fantasized about meeting him or idealized him into a corporate CEO or famous painter or doctor even. His story wasn’t even original, for Christ’s sake: absent father, alcoholic, no doubt, if his water habit was any indication.
“I’m gonna be straight with you. I owe you that. I made a lot of mistakes in my life. A lot. And they didn’t even start with you, if I’m really gonna be honest.”
“Fair enough,” I said, feeling like I’d read this before, seen it somewhere—on-screen, in self-help books on my mother’s shelf. “I don’t need to know everything.”
“All that matters now is that I’ve changed,” he said, as if he were trying to remember my name. “I’ve changed my life, Noa. I’m a different person now, and I want you to be a part of it.”
The door to the bar opened and closed, losing a handful of patrons. He looked over, a bit melancholic, as if losing them were somehow as painful as losing me.
“Do you know the owner?” I asked. “We’re practically the only ones here. Did you plan it that way?”
He grinned with undulating pride. “You’re looking at him. And of course not.”
“Okay.”
Nothing else came out, despite his necessitous expectations. Nothing else was planned. He was the one who called this little meeting. My life’s goal up until that point was far from tracking down a missing parent. It’s not like I walked around blaming the world for my problems merely because a one-night stand with my mother twenty-three years earlier resulted in my sitting at this wooden booth in North Philadelphia across from a man with a water bottle on his side like a colostomy bag, clearly on his Twelfth Step toward making sure that water bottle remained a water bottle. Still, he needed some sort of recognition for his evolution. That ridiculous scar over his lip was starting to dance into a pitiful expression of desperation and didn’t seem to stop no matter how many expressions of acknowledged understanding I tossed his way.
“Well done, then, Caleb,” I said. “Is that the proper response? You turned your life around … then what? You called me? Congratulations. You did it. You’re, what, a businessman now or just an alcoholic who owns a bar? Because that’s an effective strategy for reform.”
His brows swam together, constructing a moat of protective lines. Sarcasm clearly hadn’t made its way down the evolutionary track just yet in Dive Bar, Bar Dive. I wanted to say I was sorry, but I wasn’t.
“I just want to know you,” he said. “That’s why I called. That’s all. I want to know my daughter. I made a lot of mistakes, and now I want to fix them. It’s not a unique story. It’s just mine.”
“You’ve had twenty-three years to know me.”
“I fucked up all twenty-three of those, I know,” he pleaded. “But maybe the next twenty-three can be better? The next fifty, even.”
I swallowed the nerves at the base of my throat to make a clear pathway. “Fuck you.”
“I deserve that,” he said, almost hinting for salvation.
“Yes, you do.”
I sort of felt better after it came out, like it was waiting for the right time to arrive. Profanity can be that way—either gratuitous or magical. For me, at that moment, it was probably a combination of both, and I know my father felt the same way.
“Good,” he replied. “Now that that’s over, can we just spend time together? Get to know each other.”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t stay still, but I didn’t stand, either, trying to contemplate my next step, when he leaned forward in submission, chest first, his two hands placed together in prayer.
“Thank you, Noa.”
I squinted my eyes. “I’m sorry?”
He smiled and again softened his voice. “Thank you.”
“For—?”
“For coming here,” he said. “For not hanging up on me the way I hung up on you. For not leaving yet.”
“Don’t thank me yet for that one. My right leg here is just about to lead the way from this table.”
He swallowed a smile that was just beginning to take form. “You know what I mean.”
I hate to attribute charm to my father, but there was no other word at the moment that fit. He smiled, and the scar stretched along with it like a flattened rainbow.
I looked back to the lone patron, but it was just my father and me. The light was no longer piercing the window and instead was glimmering against the cement outside, reminding me that it was dangerously close to fifty-five minutes inside the bar.
“I really have to go,” I told him. I was actually a bit proud of myself for completing the task under time.
“Look Noa,” he said, changing the subject. His voice cracked. “You should know it’s not completely my fault that I wasn’t around for you.”
“I find that a little hard to believe.”
He focused, curious. “I can’t blame your mother for not talking about me, if she didn’t talk about me. Did she?”
I didn’t respond.
“I mean, who would want to raise her daughter knowing that the father was an alcoholic and would always be an ex-con?” he laughed to himself. “At that time, I’d probably keep me away from my child, too.”
A coarse tip to his shaky forefinger ran around the lip of the water bottle. He was nervous, true; that was not something to be debated, but it was almost an hour that I’d spent inside the bar, and at that point in my life, I followed my own dictum, despite my father’s superficial lament. I stood from the table. He rose to meet me.
“Please, Noa,” he pleaded. “Stay a little bit longer. Let me get you something to drink. To eat.” He smiled. “To punch?”
A half grin slipped from my chest, but I was already on my feet with my bag over my shoulder, and I could feel the second hand of my watch pulling me toward the door. I would not stay past one hour.
“Another time,” I said.