At 8:00 sharp, the phone would ring without fail. After three rings, the last was cut off abruptly, its tone fading into silence. Voices murmured quietly, no doubt exchanging the usual empty pleasantries. Then a sharp, seeking voice called the girl’s name. She plodded reluctantly toward the phone in the living room, reaching out a limp hand to her mother and wrinkling up her face in disgust. She listened to him talk, muttering the requisite responses to the inquiries about her sister, school, and the cat. Sullenly, the young girl slammed the phone back onto the receiver, hating the man on the other line for loving his liquor more than his family. The next night the process repeated itself drearily, but with one minor change. The girl needed help. On her geography homework she had to name the five longest rivers in America, and was utterly lost.

“Daddy? Do you know the five longest rivers in the United States?”

She knew he would.He was a lawyer with a passion for debating and history, talents that were marred by self-destruction. His excitement was palpable as he launched into a lengthy discourse about each river. She recorded his answers with the utmost care,her hand trembling as her tears fell silently.These lucid moments were rare, and she clung to them, always loving him blindly and desperately.

The next week he set out on a cross-country road trip, traveling from Connecticut to California and back again. He bought her a huge world map which he placed on her wall with uncharacteristic devotion before he left, highlighting his route in green and marking every city he would stop at. He pushed a single red tack onto New Haven, Connecticut.
Their phone calls changed during the trip. He would tell her what city he was in, reminding her to check the map and move the tack so she would know exactly where he was, wherever he was. Then he would describe the place, explaining why he had stopped there, and what it meant to him. And she listened, enraptured.
When he reached Boulder, Colorado, there was a postcard. On the back
it read:

Katie, can you name the five major rivers of the United States? Mississippi, Missouri, Rio Grande, Colorado, Red. Be good to your mother. Love, Dad.

It was short, but it was enough. She placed it below the map, and continued to move the tack for him. It left behind a trail of tiny punctures in the thin paper, and she wondered when the procession of scars would finally lead back to her. Eventually he returned, and for the first time she felt confident of his presence. His phone calls were no longer about where he was, but rather who he was. One day he told her he had decided to take the trip across America again; he hadn’t absorbed it all his first time, he explained. The bright red tack had edged a mere inch across the map when the call came; the tack remained forever still.
The girl was destroyed, full of regret and guilt and suppressed emotion. She wanted to tear the map from her wall, set fire to it, and free herself from the thousands of miles he had driven in madness, driven in desperation. But the map remained, and propped beneath it, the postcard. Time passed achingly. One day, the girl flipped the postcard over, noticing the picture for the first time. It was a cliff that naturally formed the figure of an angel with a bowed head and folded wings. ‘Angel Arch’, it was named.The girl could not contain the bubbling laughter that emerged from her. What a cruel twist of fate for her father to choose this postcard. She smiled, held it close for a moment and then grasping the tack decisively, pinned ‘Angel Arch’ onto the Colorado River, saying a final goodbye to her father.