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She’s beautiful. I can see that she is, in the way you can see that a car is fast. Everything about her is correct. Correct dress. Correct school. Correct last name. She belongs at this table so completely that the table looks like it was built around her.

I barely register her.

Her mother leans across during the first course and touches Caroline’s ear, where there’s a diamond the size of a pea catching the light from the fire, and says, “Those were Gran’s.”

And my father, from the head of the table, watches the interaction. Then he looks at me and he fucking winks.

My stomach crawls, my eyes dart down, and I remember the first time he winked at me like that in regard to women.

It was the spring of ninth grade. The awards night. My school did the athletic awards and the academic awards on the same night, in the same gym, because public schools do everything in a gym to save on chairs. My mom made him come. I was getting freshman athlete of the year for hockey, which nobody had ever gotten as a freshman, and my mother said it was important for him to be seen there, and he came.

The bleachers were half full. The academic kids went first. They called them up one at a time, and their parents stood, clapped, and took pictures on their phones, and it went on forever. I was sitting in the front row in a blazer my mother made me wear, bored out of my mind, picking at the tape on my stick that I’d brought for no reason.

And then they called her name.

Tessa Canten. Highest grade point average, freshman class.

Nobody stood up.

I remember that. Every other kid, somebody in the bleachers came up off the bench. A mom. A grandmother. A dad with a camera. When they called her name, there was a little polite clapping from the teachers’ row, and that was it. She came out from the side of the bleachers and walked across the whole gym floor by herself.

She was wearing a dress that wasn’t hers. You could tell. It was too big in the shoulders, and the sleeves had been taken up by hand, and it was black, or it had been black once, before somebody washed it too many times, so now it was the color of a road. She’d done her own hair. It was pinned up at the back, and one piece had already come loose and was hanging down the side of her neck, and she didn’t know. She walked across that floor with her chin up and her hands at her sides and nobody in the whole building watching her but me. She took the certificate from the principal, shook his hand, didn’t smile, and walked back off the other side.

I sat there with my stick across my knees and watched her go, and I didn’t clap.

Afterward, my father had the car brought around to the pickup loop. It had rained during the ceremony, and the lot was wet and black and shining under the lights, and he was behind the wheel with the engine running and the wipers off, and I was in the passenger seat holding a plaque with my name on it.

She was standing at the curb. Right under the light, by the flagpole, with her certificate in a plastic sleeve held against her chest with both arms. No coat. Just the dress. She was looking at the entrance to the lot. Every time a pair of headlights turned in off the road, her whole body went toward them, just a little, just her chin, and then the car would go somewhere else, and she’d settle back down and keep looking.

My father didn’t put the car in drive. He sat there with his hands on the wheel and watched her through the windshield.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

I replied, “Nobody.”

“She was up there tonight.”

“She’s nobody, Dad.”

He kept watching her. Water was running down the glass in thin lines, bending her through it. A car turned in. Her chin came up. The car went somewhere else.

“Pretty girl,” my father said.

When I looked at him to see if he was fucking serious, he winked at me. I’ll never forget how that felt. Like missing a step in the dark. My father doesn’t notice people. He notices the people who matter to him and the people who are in his way. I’d never once heard him call anything pretty that he didn’t already own. And I didn’t know why it made my stomach turn over, sitting there with that stupid plaque in my lap, but it did. It made me want to reach over and put my hand over his eyes.

“Dime-store diamond,” he said.

I didn’t know what he meant. I didn’t ask. My father has never once said anything he didn’t intend to explain.

“You see one every so often,” he said, still watching her. “A real stone in a cheap setting. Sitting in a case at the drugstore between the keychains and the sunglasses, and nobody around it has any idea what it is. It gets scratched up. It gets lost down a sink. It ends up on some idiot who traded a carton of cigarettes for it and never knows what he’s got.” He finally put the car in drive. “It’s not the stone’s fault. It’s the setting. The setting’s everything.”

We rolled forward. She didn’t look at the car. She was still looking at the road.

“Shame,” he said. “Look at her shoes.”

And I looked.

Canvas. Wet through at the toes.