We grab a corner table, as I insist on privacy. In one move she hops onto her seat, swings her feet forward hard and the chair slides up to the table where she bellies up.
I pull my head back in disbelief, and then look around the side of the table realizing that her feet don’t even touch the floor. That’s how she got so much leverage to slide the chair like that…while she was in it.
“Can I get you two anything?” the waitress asks, coming around very quickly.
“I’ll take—“
I raise a finger, stopping her. “She’ll have one chocolate fudge muffin with vanilla icing and rainbow sprinkles,” I say, and then pause realizing there’s nothing in this place for me.
“And you, dad?” the waitress asks.
She’s a young woman and she means well, so I don’t take offense to her thinking this is my daughter. She is a little girl after all and I’m like a giant seated next to her. If she stood I’d still be taller sitting down. Not to mention the waitress isn’t challenging me, so I let it slide.
“I’ll have a glass of water.”
“Coming right up,” she says.
“Oh, and a freshly squeezed orange juice, for my little girl,” I say, but I don’t mean it in the way the waitress thinks…it just slipped out and makes sense to me.
And I think to Diana too.
Diana giggles and then attempts to rub it in with, “She thinks you’re my dad.”
Little does she know she’s pouring gas on the fire.
“Should I call you dad too?” she laughs, slapping her hands together as she laughs at her own joke.
I lean back in my seat, my eyes narrowing as a smirk tugs at one corner of my mouth. “No sweetheart. I much prefer…Daddy.”
Her entire body freezes and an audible swallow can be heard as far as two tables over, before she starts coughing.
I grab a napkin and hand it to her and she quickly gets her coughing under control. And it’s not the kind of humorous coughing where someone is caught off guard. It’s the kind of realization coughing where someone is stopped in their tracks, their entire paradigm shifting in real time.
Nothing else is said as my eyes focus on hers, but they quickly find the floor. I reach across the table, taking her tiny chin in my hand and lift it up. “You should look me in the eye when we’re together having a conversation. Do you understand?”
She nods into my index finger and thumb.
“I need to hear you say it.”
“I understand.”
“The correct answer is…I understand, Daddy.”
“I understand…Daddy.”
My whole world flips and I have to drag myself away quickly from her and tuck my hands under the table, rock-crushing fists forming as my eyes close and I inhale deep, as if I can catch that single word, that title, still floating in the air and absorb it through all of my senses. Always.
I want to take that word and bottle it up like a lightning bug in a Mason jar on a sweltering Fourth of July night. That’s exactly what it is, what she is to me, lighting in a bottle.
“Here ya go,” the waitress says, sitting our things down. “Enjoy,” she adds before making herself disappear.
Diana looks at me as she takes a proper sized fork, the size you’d use for a meal and uses it to cut off a bite of her muffin, hot white fudge pouring out and I can’t help but picture another white, hot, sticky explosion
that would occur if a certain part of me was touched right now.
She leans to one side and then the other, her legs crossing so that she’s so small you could practically put her entire body in a FedEx overnight box. How in the world can she do that?
Taking the sticky sweetness in her mouth, she manages to get some on her cheek, and a little bit hangs around on her lip.