She asked me to help her with it the evening of the dance, which she always did because the buttons at the back were small and her fingers were not patient enough for them. I stood behind her and did the buttons one by one and looked at her face in the mirror, and she looked at her own face with an expression I could not entirely read, some mixture of things that was older than seven and younger than seven at the same time.
“Mom?” she said. “Does it still count if Dad can’t go with me?”
I sat down on the edge of her bed. My throat had closed in a way that required a moment before speaking was possible. “Of course it counts,” I said. “Your dad would want you to shine tonight. So that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
She pressed her lips together in that way she has, the way that means she is considering something carefully rather than simply accepting it. “I want to honor him,” she said. “Even if it’s just us.”
I nodded. I did not trust my voice for anything more elaborate.
She handed me her shoes, the patent leather ones with the small bow at the toe that she had picked herself, and I knelt and put them on her feet and tied the laces in double knots the way Keith always did, because she had told him once that single knots came undone when she danced and he had never tied a single knot on her shoes again. She watched me do it and did not say anything, and when I stood up she reached for the small badge that had been sitting on her dresser since the dance was announced, the printed paper one the school sent home, Daddy’s Girl in pink letters, and she pinned it over her heart with the deliberate care of someone performing a small ceremony.
She looked at herself in the mirror for a moment. Then she looked at me.
“I miss Daddy,” she said. It was not a complaint or a cry for comfort. It was simply a statement of the plain and enormous truth, offered in the matter-of-fact tone she sometimes used for things that were too large for any other register.
“I know, sweetheart,” I said. “Me too.”
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