For a short time I dated a tow-truck driver and on weekends I would ride
around with him as he impounded illegally parked cars. I find myself
telling this story at a reading I give in the city, just after I published
my book. The story gets too long and the audience looks as though they
regret coming. As I speak a few of them flip the book over, maybe to see
who published such a bad storyteller, or to check my author photo to make
sure I’m not an imposter. Whenever I talk to a group of people I have a
feeling they think I’m the least articulate writer they’ve ever met, and as
I squint into the crowd I suspect my story is unwelcome to them right now.

I tell the anecdote in response to a question from an audience member.
“What feelings went into writing this book?” she said, and as I stared at
her serious face I realized she wasn’t joking. She really wanted to know. I
couldn’t recall all my feelings, and the longer the silence extended the
more I thought I may have never had a feeling before in my life. That was
when I stuttered my way into the anecdote.

Each passing moment is an opportunity for me to stop talking, an
opportunity I glide right past.

“I was already pregnant when I met the tow-truck driver,” I say, “and by
the time I lost the baby he would be gone.”

I didn’t tell the driver I was pregnant because in general we didn’t have
conversations. We were smart in different ways—I read novels, he read
weather maps and predicted storms—and we didn’t have a lot in common,
though we both liked driving the quiet early morning roads underneath the
sunrise. Tridents of light striking the cars we towed. Their owners
sleeping somewhere. In particular I liked the motion of riding in a big
truck, how high above the road we loomed, like no accident could really
hurt me. I also had this idea I would publish an exposé about this towing
company. The police chief owned the company and it was Newark police that
ordered the cars towed. I would eventually decide not to get involved
because I didn’t want to make enemies of the police. There was one who was
my friend, a mounted officer who let me pet his horse whenever he rode down
my street and I happened to be outside. The horse was named Bullet, a name
that disappointed me because it seemed too obvious.

I wasn’t just dating the driver because of the article I wanted to write. I
genuinely liked him, however wrong we were for each other. His smile took
up his whole face, but he only smiled when the world gave him reason to.
This reminded me of my father, who was a similar type of friendly
curmudgeon, though my father probably wouldn’t have liked the tow-truck
driver because he was older than I was, and because my father, who’d spent
many nights in the drunk tank, didn’t trust anyone who did the bidding of
the police. He would think I was wasting my time. His own marriage had
failed—each pill he popped ground down my mother’s patience—but he would
probably want me to be married by now. He was a traditionalist, in addition
to being a drug addict.

My friends began to gossip about me when they found out I was spending my
Saturday mornings with a man I wouldn’t let them meet. I didn’t talk much
with the driver, and never mentioned my friends or my father, because I
cried a lot back then and didn’t want to cry in front of him. I liked
crying but didn’t like to interpret how my crying made other people feel.

I’d chosen to have the baby even though the doctors said it would be
high-risk and looked at me like I was crazy for wanting to go through with
it. They didn’t seem surprised when I lost it four months in and seemed to
think I shouldn’t have been surprised either, though I might have been
projecting by this point. Generally I like my doctors but right then I
wanted to hate them.

The child was still growing inside me, a beautiful doomed thing, during my
days with the driver. Maybe that’s why I still think of him so much. If I’d
known I would lose the baby I might’ve told him I was pregnant. Or told my
friends. I did tell my father, during one of the imagined conversations I
sometimes had with him, but I can’t say if he heard me. He’d needed me
before he died. He’d even written me an email to tell me he was lonely, and
I ignored him, so maybe it was his turn to ignore me. In a way I thought of
my baby as a second chance at taking care of someone, which wasn’t a
healthy thing to think.

My father would have been a good grandfather, I include as an afterthought.

“So that was it,” I say to the audience in the bookstore. “That was one of
the feelings that made me write this book. It’s the feeling that life is
always on the brink of never being the same again, and sometimes pieces of
our lives fall off the edge, but some things, good and bad, we carry with
us after the crash. And those things make us who we are. And then you find
something or someone that helps you survive and persevere. For me it was
trying to write this book with hope.

“I mean,” I add, “there is friendship and hope in this book.
Right?”

I sound desperate by now. I know I should stop talking, let the audience
go, release their attention before they’re forced to stumble through the
rows of chairs, coats in hand, trying to sneak out quietly while pretending
they had to leave early all along.

“Does that answer your question?” I ask.

The woman who asked the question nods. Silence inflates in the room, a
giant suffocating balloon. No one has any other questions, and it’s time
for me to thank the audience for coming and let them disperse to bars to
laugh about how awkward I was, how I used the reading as an excuse to share
my emotions. Or to forget about the reading entirely and immediately. But I
hold onto the silence. There’s a feeling I was hoping for, one I didn’t get
tonight. I’m searching faces for someone who might give it to me. Tonight
is a night my father would’ve been proud of me. The book is a baby in one
sense or another, and I’m yearning to glimpse the glow of that pride in
someone’s eyes. I can’t find it anywhere, and it’s not because the people
here despise me, as I worry they do, but simply because none of them is my
father. And the longer I look the less likely it seems that I’ll find him.