My daughter, shinkicker is what her business cards say, so cute, made with the ditto machine on the back porch. I sleep off the benders there, my dreams in CMYK. She waits for me to come around and does a reading, the backs of her cards decorated with a made-up tarot: The Pumpkin, The Sizzlean, The Mama, The Mister Calhoun, The Spiderman, The Doghouse. She shakes her head seriously no matter what card comes up. “Oh jeez,” she says, flipping over The Mustard Jar, shaking her head seriously. “Oh god,” I say, “what does that mean?” And she lets out a long, slow breath, and: “Not good, Daddy.”

I told her she wasn’t allowed to put our phone number on the cards so she used our Thomas Guide coordinates instead. Business has been slow, but it’s summer, what do you want. She keeps in practice and I’m an especially good provider on Saturday afternoons when I’m leaning heavily against the porch swing. I get to the point I call dissociation, where I can still feel cold and heat and pain and pleasure but I’ve disconnected the emotion from them. So I definitely experience the sensation of being sunburned or kicked in the shins but I don’t perceive them as positive or negative. They are merely events. And she goes to town, putting on her church shoes and working me over, leaving perfect black bruises all up and down my legs.

She makes me proud. Someday she’ll find someone able to pay what she’s worth but I hope that day’s still a long way off.