He did not flinch. He looked at her for a long moment with those lake-colored eyes, and she waited for him to explain, the way people explain: the flights, the weather, the money, the job, the distance, the thousand reasonable things that keep people from showing up for the dead. She was ready for all of them. She had prepared a speech about every one of them.
"No," he said.
That was all. Just no. She found she had no speech for that.
"He loved you," she said. "You know that? He talked about you at dinner like you were in the next room. Danny's building a boat for a dentist in Seattle. Danny's got a dog now. Danny says it rained thirty-one days in a row. My mother used to say we should set a place for you. She stopped saying it, after a while."
"I know," he said.
"How would you know?"
"He told me," Danny said. "Every couple of weeks. For twelve years." He touched the silver present on top of the pile in her arms, just with one finger, on the foil, as if to make sure it was there. "We sent tapes. Cassettes. You knew about the tapes."
She had known. Of course she had known. Her father in his chair in the den with the shoebox recorder on his knee, talking to it in a low voice with the door half closed, and her mother saying he's doing his Danny tape, leave him be. She had been fourteen, sixteen, nineteen, and it had never once occurred to her to wonder what he said. She had only felt, in a dim and childish part of herself that she was not proud of, that it was another hour of her father that went into a padded envelope and away to Washington State.