Out of the Picture

When my narcissistic, flighty daughter disappears for months—my telephone calls unheard like the echoes of falling trees in the forest—she imagines, I guess, that I am a lonesome pine. 

Tell me if you think this qualifies as pining. Sometimes when I walk into her old bedroom I experience a kind of vertigo: all stages of her, my life with her, are overlaid and nested inside each other and happening at once. Two years old and bouncing on my knee at the coffee shop the day a photographer asked if he could take our picture. He handed me his card, but gave me the photo for free (it’s the only one of the two of us that she displays). Jen at fourteen years old,...

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