People always asked me if I missed my mother. That they were so sorry that such a terrible thing would happen to a poor, young child at such a fragile age. That they felt so bad that I had grown up without the maternal influence all young girls needed and wanted. I told them not to feel that way, that I never knew my mother, that I didn’t need their pity when they didn’t know anything but blind copy-paste compassion (or so my father told me to say).

(I didn’t know what to think. Not when my mother died on the other side of the country in another life, with two sons and a loving husband to weep for her. I thought she had enough tears.)

I didn’t know how to respond when they scolded me for listening to my father, that this was why little girls needed mothers so that they would grow to proper young ladies, not smart-mouthed, sassy ones. I told father this, one night, and he told me, cigarette loose between his fingers, to tell them that “a group of gossipers has nothing good to say about mothering, seeing how their own kids are doing,” and took the deepest, most exhausted drag from his smoldering stick, and we watched the smoke slip from between his lips, melt among the hazy night sky.

A moth flutters through the smoke.

(What did Audrey’s mother think she knew? That an absent mother was any good?)

Then Olivia came outside. I waited for her to yell at father like she always did when he smoked on the balcony, tell him that “you’re only killing yourself by smoking those, Robin.”

She didn’t, for a change.

(She was a nice woman, Olivia. I didn’t know how father felt about her, but he seemed to enjoy her company, nagging conversations and all. Come to think of it, I thought he almost liked her. I didn’t mind that.)

“Sorry about your wife.”

“Yeah, thanks. But not in front of the kid.”

(It’s the most sincere thing I’d heard father speak all day.)

“Well, it’s nice to enjoy a clear night like this, don’t you think?”

“Right.”

(Sometimes I thought Olivia was the only person on the planet besides myself that father treated well. Whenever he was out late at work, as I lay awake in bed, I imagined that he was like that to mother, but scolded myself for believing that. If they were, they wouldn’t be apart. Not that it bothered me.)

I offered to retire early, that I was tired and that it was alright if he wanted to stay out a little longer because I knew how it felt to have to leave someone. I’m sure he knew far too well, but the child’s mind finds need to say every thought it thinks.

But as all fathers went, he, the selfless, single father who smoked one too many cigarettes each night and told me that he was working late so he could be alone, put his ten year old daughter first and patted the empty wicker deck chair beside him. “No, no. Stay out as long as you want.”

The moth flutters about father's head. He doesn't bat at it.

Olivia says nothing, but she and father exchange a look. I dare not speak for fear of tearing the gentle quiet between them. She leaves us in the brisk autumn night, stars gleaming like wayward pearls, the only trace of her presence the crisp echo of her wooden sandals clicking thrice across her lacquered balcony.

A sigh, heavy and quiet like the thick smoke snaking from the burning lethargy between his lips. I remember that sigh. Like the quiet tink, tink, tink of the moth crashing against the balcony light before it flew away. It was sad, tired, stretched too thin and worked too hard.

So I sat beside him until the sky turned a dusty pink mottled purple like fading bruises left by the night.

And we simply were.