"I've taken up golf," Sheila says to her father, sitting on the manicured park lawn. Around them, the wind ruffles an elm's jagged leaves; an occasional acorn drops from the oak directly above. Not a bench in sight. Sheila wonders if her father is comfortable on the ground like this, but she doesn't ask. Golf is what she wants to tell him about. "I've been playing for a year."

"Always knew you had the body for it – tall, lean, those long arms. Where did you pick it up?" He is so handsome still, even in his sixties; his hair full and silver, his neck buried in the black cowl of the sweater Sheila gave him for Christmas when she was twelve.

"Jake taught me." Sheila feels the flinch in her father's expression, even without looking directly at him – then the sigh in preparation for hearing about another one of her fleeting cast of suitors. "Jake was an ad man I went out with a year ago. An ad man, Dad, like you."

"A copywriter?"

Sheila picks at the grass poking up between her white Keds but doesn't answer. Jake was nothing more than a salesman, peddling radio ad time.

"I really like the game, Dad. It's very social, and challenging."

"Took you long enough." Her father is talking in a father voice, not the adult-to-adult conversation Sheila is hoping for. She remembers the year of her growth spurt – her mother nicking off five feet nine inches on the linen closet door jamb when she turned fourteen, standing on her tiptoes to reach over Sheila's head with her stubby pencil, her father nodding in approval from the hall. That was the year he started the yammering about her playing golf, then one Friday came home with a set of clubs from the Soroptomist Thrift Store. She'd never made time to play together.

A woman carrying an armload of red gladiolas walks past them, the tap of her pointed heels on the cement path the only noise during their wide lapse in conversation, lasting minutes. Her father sits still, with perfect posture.

"I can make a great old-fashioned," Sheila says, with the exuberance of an eight-year-old. Years ago, the last time Sheila saw her father, she was only a vodka drinker. Now the singe of whiskey down her throat is what she craves, the burn of a cocktail that makes its presence known from the smallest sip.

"You muddle the sugar?"

"Of course."

"A sugar cube?"

"Oh, a sugar cube? I forgot. I've been using regular sugar."

He shakes his head. "It's gotta be a cube, so it melts just right as you muddle with the water."

"Okay, I'll try that. But I do use an orange slice, and one cherry, and I don't overkill on the soda."

"And pack it with crushed ice."

"Yes, I pack it with... ice." Sheila stumbles on her reply because she does not have a crusher, red and white plastic with a vicious circle of spikes and a crank on the side like her father has, in his bar in the unused party room full of rattan furniture and bamboo walls. She has been making and drinking her own old-fashioneds every night for the better part of a year.

Her father seems uninterested in elaborating on anything he's been doing for the past six years, since the last time Sheila saw him. She can't believe he's wearing the old sweater she gave him and that it's in such perfect condition.

"I have the video set of the Thin Man movies," she says, a high pitch of hope in her voice.

"So you've finally come around to William Powell?"

"Yes." The movies had been Martin's idea. He knew almost all the lines and Sheila was just learning some, too, when he abruptly moved to Vegas with the bowling alley waitress, leaving behind the set of tapes. "Boy, they drink a lot."

"That's how it was in those days. Did you know William Powell played Sherlock Holmes in the silents in 1922? He was under contract to Paramount until '31."

"And Asta, great dog of the detective movies." She wants to impress her father with her knowledge of character names.

"Hmmm, yes, a good distraction."

An acorn falls in Sheila's open lap. Why did you leave? She wants to shout at him but then she remembers that he didn't leave, really, just retreated more often to his basement workbench and his clumsy fabrication of wooden train cars. He wasn't a hobby man, yet he toiled in the dank recesses behind the laundry room more and more as the years went on. It was Sheila who'd left to "find herself," leaving a cryptic note under a Roto-Rooter magnet on the refrigerator for her parents to find in the morning.

"Have you listened to any Artie Shaw lately?" Sheila asks after his favorite musician, now that Wally has enlightened her to jazz.

"Not much." Nothing more is offered.

"I have the remixed Bluebird collection, if you want to come over sometime and listen to it. 'Monsoon' and 'Any Old Time' are my favorites."

"'Star Dust' was always mine." His brow pleats. He looks beyond her shoulder.

When she was very small, he would put Artie Shaw on the hi-fi and pick her up to dance in his arms, her pudgy legs dangling around his high waist. She remembers the short hairs on his neck, below his formal crew cut, and the barely-there smell of English Leather, worn off from another day at the ad agency. In later years, he would tromp through the house slamming doors against her Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, blasted from a cheap stereo she bought with her fry cook money.

If Sheila reaches over to him now, could she still feel the short hairs on his neck? It has been years since they've touched, not even now when she first saw him after all this time.

Sprinklers turn on in a far quadrant. Sunset is close by, they should be leaving. She reaches to lay her hand on his neck – he doesn't move. Her vision blurs as her eyes fill up. Withdrawing her hand, she takes a pint bottle of whiskey from her windbreaker pocket. A long pull, the familiar scorch. Sheila lets the bottle fall from her hand, onto the grocery-store bouquet of flowers she bought that morning, lying limp against the emerald grass. She looks harder at the place she touched. 1937-2002. This the only thing left he can tell her.

Martha Clarkson