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mother stood up. He seemed to tower over me like a giant. He looked nervous and kept fiddling with his hands. This was him? The man I’d waited for my whole life?
    I blinked. A lot. I was caught off guard. No matter how many times I had pictured this moment in my head, I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t sure how to react. I definitely felt a jolt of excitement; the butterflies in my stomach were flying into each other. But I couldn’t move. My feet were glued to the floor.
    My dad looked into my eyes and smiled. “Hello, Pattie,” he said with kindness. I don’t remember us having a moment anything like the daydream I had reserved in my head for the past seven years. Although we didn’t have a palpable connection, there was no extreme awkwardness between us. Our company was comfortable enough to warrant a pleasant dinner that evening with my brother, Chris. The three of us even went to the mall afterward, and my dad bought me a soft E.T. doll. I was thrilled. It replaced Thumbelina, who had been hijacked and destroyed by my brother not long after my dad gave her to me.
    That night my dad returned home to Timmins, a ten-hour drive away, but he promised to keep in touch. After the shock wore off, I was beside myself. My dad was back. I was on cloud nine that I was going to have a relationship with him. I mattered again. This was my moment, and nothing could take him away from me. Nothing.
    My dad kept his promise. I remember getting phone calls from him every now and then. He even mailed me the best gift ever. I had been begging my mom for cable TV in my room, but we didn’t have a cable outfit upstairs. My father mailed me the longest cable cord I have ever seen in my entire life so I could connect my TV to the downstairs line. My mother wasn’t happy because the cable had to run from the first floor living room up the stairs, through the hall, and into my room. I, on the other hand, was ecstatic. Cable in my room! Wow!
    A few months after my dad’s visit, my brother had made plans to spend the summer with my dad, his wife, and his extended family. On the morning Chris was supposed to leave, my mom got a phone call. It was only six thirty in the morning. I didn’t hear the phone ring, but I did hear the door to my bedroom creak open and my mom walk over to my bed. I was groggy, still in a sleep fog.
    “Pattie, I’m sorry,” she told me. “Your father died last night. He had a heart attack.” She told me my brother had already left for Timmins and would attend the funeral.
    It was peculiar. I felt nothing. It was like almost at the sound of those words, the finality of the statement, my heart instantly turned off. Every bit of hope that had stemmed from being reunited with my dad vanished. As I’d done time and time again in the past, I detached myself emotionally to protect myself from feeling anything at all. I became completely disconnected to keep myself safe from even the slightest bit of emotion. I did, however, feel sorry for my mom and ask her if she was okay. She, of course, was fine. I allowed myself to be led by her example, so I too was fine. No muss. No fuss.
    Six years later, some of the volcanic emotions that had been buried that day started steaming their way to the surface. I went to visit my dad’s tombstone in Timmins. Most of our relatives on both sides lived there, so our family made the drive at least once a year to visit. On a clear sunny day, absent of any noise outside of a landscaper trimming nearby bushes, I stood in front of his grave and yelled at the top of my lungs.
    For about an hour, I screamed at the inanimate slab of stone in hopes of surfacing the emotions I knew were inside of me. I was angry but not full of rage, though I knew the rage existed somewhere. I had spent my life stuffing down emotion, shoving aside my hurts and pains, pushing legitimate feelings down so deep that apparently even I couldn’t dig them out, not even by staring at the tombstone bearing my father’s