There was always the smell of linseed oil and terpentine and greyish, dirty-looking rags around. And there was a great big book on the coffee table of famous paintings. I hadn't seen my father for two years.

There were pictures of throngs of angels and chubby cupids with naked rumps and kneeling, Immaculate Virgins. My father seemed a teeny bit uneasy that I preferred to sit on the couch with the large book of pictures, rather than move around.

Unfathomably deep, the roar of a plane, passing over, consoled me. I was a tall girl but still uncentered and not yet transformed into a stable, feminine soul. The years without my father, whom, in my heart, I felt more comfortable with and liked best, were clearly leaving their mark on my eventual transition into womanhood.

Like the star prizefighter, I had been coached, two years earlier, by my mother, beforehand, on what to say to the Judge, when time came for awarding custody. It was my complete spiritual undoing that I hadn't been spontaneous and chosen my father Although, as my mother always reminded me, he never did the caring for me.

A patch of light, like a hand on a sundial, moved an increment along the hardwood floor.

Before I knew it, it was time to go.

I wouldn't see my father again for four years.