The fog was in, heavy, when I got home. I had half a duplex in the far western reaches of the city, a block from the ocean, where the fog is almost always heavy. It chokes the morning light and leaves a film of salt scum on windowpanes. The neighborhood is subdued, as a neighborhood will be when the sky hangs so low you can touch it. Cars mutter along the street, kids shuttle glumly in and out of school buses, the wind hisses as it shoves sand under the front door. I had lived in the duplex for more than ten years, since my divorce; why so long, I can't say, except that I rented it on a rare sunny afternoon and never hated it enough to leave.

     I opened the door and threw on all the lights. Flipped through my mail and found nothing addressed by human hand. Pawed through drawers and closets until I came up with a pasteboard box, some bubble padding, a roll of sealing tape.

     At lunch hour that day I'd bought an ornament, dried flowers within stained glass and crystal. It had seemed a proper gift for a twenty-year-old woman. I had a card, too, a cartoon cat. To a purrfect daughter.

     I sat and opened it in front of me.

     Dearest Markie, I wrote in the card, and stopped. It sounded childish. Martha was her name. I didn't know what she used these days.

     Happy Birthday. How I wish I could be with you.

     But you'll have to take my word for it, I thought.

     You are forever in my heart—you know that.

     Or do you?

     Your loving father.

     I closed the card and held the ornament up to the light. It was pretty and pointless, a shot-in-the-dark gift. I thought of her and saw a girl ten years old, baby-plump, credulous. That daughter, I knew how to please. It came to me that she was preserved in my mind probably far better than in her own; my memory of her had little