Ernie's Ark Read Online Free PDF Page A

recognition. Plus a roomy dining-room table on which to feed his five noble, sad-eyed children whose superior intelligence shall never be known because of people like me intent on keeping the tired tired, the poor poor, and the masses huddled. Unlike me, however, my daughter has never been a common man. What the common man wants is money, and that’s all she wrote.
    “I hate you, Daddy,” my daughter says to me after we order grilled cheese and coffee. “I hate you so much right now.”
    “Well, there’s something. There’s a word I understand.”
    “I love you, too.” Her eyes begin to water and I’m hoping she won’t choose this moment to make a scene. She was an even-tempered girl until she fell in with all these mentors and program evaluators. “It’s very hard to talk to you, Daddy. You don’t understand how closed off you are, how totally withholding.”
    “Well, I’m sorry,” I tell her. Which I’m not. What I am is tired and worried and thinking of a meeting in New York where some asshole mediators are putting my balls in a vise and I’m not even there to say Ow. I am trying to be a good father.
    “How’s Garrett?” I ask pleasantly, referring to her fish-fingered also-ran of a fiancé.
    “Fine,” she says. “You don’t address me by name, Daddy, have you ever noticed that?”
    I have noticed that. I am in fact deliberate about that, and if she were such a crackerjack first-in-her-class future therapist it may have occurred to her that she has the same name as her mother, and that when I address her by her mother’s name I feel as if I’m embroiled in one of Emily’s old battles, with rules and exceptions and loopholes that make running five paper mills feel about as daunting as calling the numbers at a church bingo. It might also have occurred to her that because I had come to despise her mother at the time she died, I keep forgetting that what my daughter still feels is a wallop of grief, which is simpler, I’m guessing, than the messy assault of thoughts that visited me when I heard of Emily’s sudden death.
    I didn’t say I was a wonderful man, only that I was trying to be a good father.
    “Is this it?” I ask.
    “Is this what?” my daughter asks.
    “Is this what you brought me along for, to eat in a punky diner and tell me you hate me?”
    She narrows her eyes, which reminds me, as I have been reminded eerily often since we got into the car in front of my office on West Fifty-seventh Street early this morning, of my dead ex-wife. When I saw my daughter flagging me at the corner, I thought with all my heart that she was my wife Emily of long ago, that lovely, tender-lipped brunette who had a way of reeling toward you as if compelled by unknowable forces to reach a destination just beyond your own shoulders. My daughter Emily, like my wife Emily before her, has not once put enough clothing on her body. Against this cold October day—forty-five degrees at eight this morning—this day on which we were to head north, she armored herself with a flimsy sweater and a pair of sandals. Seeing my daughter do this, the heels of her sandals clicking madly on the sidewalk, I recalled reluctantly that I once loved the original Emily so much that the first time she refused to marry me I stayed up all night weeping beside the dirty river that divided the pitiful towns we came from.
    “I said I loved you, too,” my daughter tells me.
    “So noted.”
    The waitress, whom I now suspect of suffering from the final stages of cancer or TB, brings us each a flat, oozing grilled-cheese sandwich with a side of chips that she delivers with that same underhand slide.
    “What’s your name?” my daughter asks her.
    The waitress’s eyebrows, two wavy penciled lines, lift. “Randi,” she says. “With an
i.
”
    “Randi, this lunch looks delicious,” my daughter says. “Thank you, Randi.”
    The waitress swallows what I take to be a bellow of repressed laughter and whisks away. Suddenly I feel