My sincerest thanks to Denny Wheeler for editing this story and to Wizard, the Night Hawk, and Old Man Ted for their input.

"It is so not fair! You and Mom and the squirt got to, like, take a vacation on the way to Ohio and I don't," Caysi said with a quivering, pouty lower lip. I'm still getting used to that name. It's what happens when you leave your older daughter alone in San Diego for four months. When the rest of us moved to Columbus in February, the name was Casey.

Okay, she wasn't exactly alone. She had stayed with my cousin and his wife, who were first generation Californians. At the time it had seemed like a good idea.

"Well, you're the one who wanted to stay here to avoid the snow," I replied as I tried to lift another suitcase into the back of the SUV without ripping off its handle. An equivalent volume of lead would have been lighter. I realized with sudden clarity that I was about to learn what a hernia felt like.

Her mother had needed twenty-three years of single life plus nine or ten years of marriage to cultivate the same indignant look that Casey, I mean Caysi, had developed in only fifteen. "Oh, please! Like, it was so not the weather, Dad. Like, I didn't want to leave in the middle of classes, you know."

I pushed the suitcase forward until it hit the back of the middle seat. I'd folded down the rear seats, not because I needed the extra room but because I didn't want all that weight concentrated at the rear of the vehicle. The middle would give a more stable ride and better control. If the engine was strong enough to move the load. I gasped for air, amazed that I could do so without emitting a scream. Nothing left but cosmetic cases, gym bags, and other small items weighing not more than a quarter-ton each.

"Sure. You didn't want to leave Angie, Brittany, and Amy," I said, wondering how she managed to squeeze an entire set of barbells in the cosmetic case. A man my age didn't need this much outdoor exercise at ten on a San Diego June morning.

Her green eyes seemed to roll up and vanish under her coppery eyebrows. "Angi, Brytni, and Aymi."

I scooted the case forward and gasped for air. "What?" She repeated it. "That's what I said."

Abby no longer could do the 'How stupid can you get?' look better than Casey. Caysi. "No, you went, like, 'Angie and Brittany and Amy, ' but it's like 'Angi, Brytni, and Aymi, ' you know."

I shook my head. Maybe the strain had busted a blood vessel in the hearing part of my brain. "What's the difference?"

She pronounced them both ways again, tilted her head acutely to one side, and arched her eyebrows in anticipation. "So, do you, like, see now?"

No way in hell. "Sounds exactly the same to me."

This time it was the look of vexation that's about equal to Abby's, accompanied by the arm-lifting by which Abby signified I was too thick-headed to ever understand.

I blinked. I remembered that sleeveless striped red blouse having short sleeves when I left. She turned her back to me in frustration, and I blinked again. "You forgot your bra."

"Daaaaaaaad!" She dropped her arms and spun to face me. "Like, you're not supposed to be looking at my tits, you know."

It seems we had some alterations to our vocabulary while I was gone. "Then why did you rip off your sleeves and forget to put on a bra if you don't want people looking at your boo ... your, uh, breasts?"

She did it again, this time mumbling, "Men!"

"Okay," I said to her back. I wanted to say my piece now, in case I didn't survive lifting the gym bag. "You'll just have to translate what I say into..." I didn't know what to call it. "Californese. Aren't you going to put a bra on before we leave?"

She dropped her arms and her head and spoke slowly. "Like, do you wanna call Mom and, like, have her explain it to you?" The implication was that maybe an old fogy female might be able to explain it to an old fogy male in terms he could understand.

Me call Abby? No way in hell. Abby was the one who argued for Casey ... Caysi ... Casey-at-the-time to go with us in February. I was the one who argued to leave her here.

I loaded the rest of her things into the back, the silence broken only by several strained grunts, three whimpers, a whine, two "Oh, shit!"s and one "God damn!"

I had to lean against the door to close it. I didn't have the arm strength to pull. "Come on. Let's go say goodbye to Phoenix." She sidled away from my reaching arm. Gravity took over as the last muscle died, and it flopped to my side. She moped around the side of the house ahead of me.

That was odd. She'd apparently grown during that four month stretch. I didn't remember the bottoms of her butt cheeks peeking out of those cut-offs four months earlier.

Phoenix was sunning himself next to his pool. He was the quintessential graying hippie surfer, clasping a cold beer in a frozen gel holder. He was wearing a pair of Speedos that were about as wide as a strip of lasagna and looked like they were smuggling a cannoli. "Hey, man, like, I'm totally sorry I couldn't help with the bags, you know, but my back is, like, killing me. It's like all I can do to stand up, you know."

Phoenix and I go way back, all the way to when he and Rainbow were my cousin Calvin Donatello and my neighbor Isabella Epstein growing up with me in Philadelphia. Maybe I should rephrase that, since only I grew up. Anyway, that's how I knew he was lying.

Not that I wouldn't have gotten out of hoisting Cas ... I mean, Caysi's bags myself if I could have. "Don't sweat it, cuz. I wouldn't want you to put yourself out of work any longer than necessary, especially since Rainbow has to work two jobs now to augment your meager unemployment. So, uh, when do you think you'll be able to manage a job this time?"

"I expect about another week, dude. Maybe two." He reached up a hand, and I shook it. Then he jiggled an index finger at Caysi. "You hang ten, there, Cayse. Don't take any plastic surfboards." He managed to lift his head and then his mirrored sunglasses to peer down at her right foot. "How's that ankle?"

Miss Mopey exploded out of her funk. "Oh, it's like wow! now. It's, like, so not hurting or burning or itching or anything, you know?"

"Like, I told you so, babe. The Inkster's totally chillin'. Got that, like, magic touch. Totally fine artist, too."

Ever have somebody throw a bucket of ice water at you on a hot day? That's how I suddenly felt. "Wait one minute!" I looked at the red rose above her right ankle. "Are you saying that's not one of your decals? That it's a tattoo? A real tattoo?"

She looked at the graffiti marring her ankle and then gave me a huge smile. "Chillin', isn't it?" She seemed rather upset that I didn't immediately agree with her.

"CALVIN!"

He grinned up at me. "Phoenix, dude."

He wanted pseudonyms, so I gave him one from high school. "QUICK DRAW!"

He glanced around. "Dude! Somebody might, like, hear that! I, like, got my studly image to maintain, you know."

"How could you let her get an ankle tattoo!"

"The Inkster's a friend, man. Did them totally free. Didn't cost her a penny, or you either."

"I don't care if they were free, how could..."

Uh oh.

"Them?"

Phoenix beamed like a new father showing off his first kid. "Yeah, dude! Two totally righteous pieces of work. He knows how to blend his colors, like, real subtle-like, you know. And both of them for free. Well, I, like, bought the margaritas, but The Inkster's, like, a total professional, dude. He won't take a drop until the job's done. Like, he calls it 'pride of workmanship.' Dude thinks he made that up himself." Phoenix shook his head. "He ain't too bright, even if he is, like, a totally righteous artist, you know."

"Neither is somebody who would let another man's fifteen-year-old daughter get a tattoo." I circled around Caysi. "I don't see another tattoo. Where is it?"

She looked like a toad being strangled. A pretty toad with copper-colored hair down to the armpits. "Daaaaaaaad! Like, there are some things a girl just doesn't show her father, you know."

I frowned. "There's a law against showing me a tattoo?"

I got the 'How stupid can you get?' look again. "Like, not the tattoo. The location, you know?"

"Location? What location?"

"Daaaaaaaad!"

"Calvin?"

"Phoe ... uuuuh ... hey, dude, it's totally her body, you know? You don't own a copyright on it or anything. And slavery totally ended in, like, eighteen ... uh, something or other, with Lincoln winning the Revolutionary War. Or maybe it was World War One when he righteously beat the not happenin' French pirates? But, like, she's got a fundamental right to privacy totally guaranteed by the Constitution..."

He was receding into babble, as he always did when he had no legitimate retort in an argument, so I ignored him. "It's somewhere I'm not supposed to see, yet you exposed it to this Inkstain and Calvin?"

"That's Inkster, dude."

"Shut up, Quick Draw."

"Pauly!" he whined, looking around again to see if anyone was in earshot of the nickname. When he found no one, he went back to nursing his beer, recognizing his defeat.

Caysi, however, continued alone. "It's like the Inkster is, like, a doctor, you know? You wouldn't, like, go to a doctor and expect him to, like, treat you for the clap without dropping your pants, would you, Dad?"

"You dropped your pants in front of this Inkstain and Calvin?"

"Daaaaaaaad! Phoenix was, like, the nurse assisting the surgeon, you know? Besides, it's not like Rainbow could because she was, like, working, you know."

I didn't bother pointing out the incongruity of a surgeon treating gonorrhea. On the other hand, if it were an advanced case and antibiotics were useless...

No. I was distracting myself from the issue at hand.

I recognized defeat, too. "Fine! You can show your mother, then." We made our goodbyes with the reclining Phoenix, whose back was too sore for him to stand up, and left. As I reached the front corner of the house I heard the rattle of the diving board and a loud splash.

I learned a couple of things those first few days. The Grand Canyon, for instance, was "A radical example of the consequences of environmental disinterest." Yes, I did ask for a translation of that, and the translation needed a subsequent translation. Recognize defeat and quit time. And I learned that Carlsbad Caverns was "A major hole," but one with apparently no environmental deficiencies attached. Whereas White Sands was "Just like snow but without that cold weather aching your fingers out."

I also learned that wherever this tattoo was, it didn't show when Caysi wore her shorty top and matching panties to bed. That is, it didn't show during a cursory visual inspection for owner modifications. The first night at a motel I scanned for it and got a, "Daaaaaaaad! Are you checking me out?" while I was looking for the tattoo. I don't think she bought the truthful answer of "No" as I rolled over in my bed and waited for her to turn out the light over hers.

Lights out didn't occur for several minutes because she sat on her bed in a lotus position, her back to me and chanted her mantra, "Ommmmmmmm." Which would have been okay, I guess, if she hadn't chanted it loud enough to keep me awake.

The next couple of days went well. For some reason she thought the Alamo was "Chillin'!" and didn't involve any environmental impact analysis. The oil wells we saw were "A stain on the fundamental testament of man", though she didn't mind riding past them in a large, air-conditioned SUV with semi-reclining seats that let her put her feet on the dash.

And then we had our usual picnic-style lunch at an interstate rest stop. As usual, we parked at a table near the back of the area, as far away from the restrooms and vending machines as possible. Something to do with how their layout disturbed the feng shui of the little park.

We put away the picnic materials and closed the back doors of the SUV. As usual, I carried the trash to the feng shui-disturbing, but environmentally necessary, metal bins designed for its receipt. She clambered over the fence and onto the adjoining property to grab something off the ground. Whether she was trying to beat a magpie to something shiny or to rescue an endangered species that was responsible for global warming or merely to rectify the feng shui of that corner of the universe, I didn't know. And I knew better than to ask. She snatched it up and attempted to climb back over the fence with one hand, the other holding whatever it was.

And lost her balance. Arms windmilling she fell backward and sat down hard. Whatever it was went sailing off to her right rear, and she let out a shriek that I could have recorded and sold to a Halloween spook house for good money.

She sprang up and began dusting the seat of her shorts, only to cry out again, this time more quietly as she jerked her hands around to look at them.

"DADDY!"

She had landed on a small, low bush containing a cross between peppercorns and porcupines. The seat of her shorts was covered with them, except where her left hand had pulled a swath away when she tried to brush them off. Those had become imbedded in her hand. Apparently it had happened quickly enough to keep her from also brushing with her right hand.

I lifted her over the fence and used a stick to scrape away the dried fruit from her palm. Somehow she'd avoided getting any stuck in her fingers. Several barbs detached and remained in her hand. She danced around and whimpered and chanted her new mantra, "My butt hurts!" The little spines were long enough to penetrate the thin cloth.

I looked around and thought for a moment. "Okay. The way we're parked, nobody can see the back of the vehicle from the service building or the main parking lot. Nobody can drive up without us seeing them coming because it's one-way traffic.

"I'll get the first aid kit from under your front seat while you stand behind the vehicle and remove your shorts. Pull them down slowly, and that will remove most of the stickers. I'll use tweezers to remove the few that are left and get those out of your hand. I think there's some anti-itch goo in the kit, too. Then you can put on some other shorts.

"Pull them down slowly, understand? If you jerk, the prickles will break off and stay in you, and well be here the rest of the day trying to get them out. Okay?"

She was trying to hold back tears. "I can't!"

"Okay. Do you need help pulling off your shorts?"

"No, Daddy! I mean I can't take them off! I'm not wearing underwear!"

I blinked at her. What was the right thing to say? Better yet, what was NOT the wrong thing? Should I mention that I would be more like a surgeon than Inkstain with his tattoo gun?

"Look, honey, you have a choice: you can remove your shorts and pull most of those prickles out of your rear, or you can ride face down on the back seat for two days and nights and let your mother pull them out. Better not drink any liquids for those two days, though, or you'll be pulling them down soon enough."

"Daaaaaaaad!"

I threw up my hands in frustration. "Hey, I'm flexible. I'm willing to go with Plan C. What is it?"

She squinted at me, wrinkling her nose with the movement. "Huh?"

"I thought so. Look, there are multiple stickers on almost every one, and the barbs on the stickers won't let me pull them out by pulling on the ... uh, the ... fruit? Berry? Burr? The main part where the prickles grow out from. They'll hang in the cloth and break off, and then you may not be able to get them out of your skin after you remove the shorts, no matter how carefully you try. So, choose: Plan A or Plan B."

She stood there, looking decidedly undecided. I wasn't helping by standing there waiting expectantly, so I excused myself to get the first aid kit. She opened the rear doors again as I pulled the kit from under the front passenger seat.

I opened it to check the contents and almost threw them everywhere when I jumped. I jumped because of the screech from behind the vehicle. The screech from behind the vehicle was caused by the shorts around her ankles. More precisely, it was caused by jerking down the shorts now lying around her ankles. Pulling slowly had hurt, so she'd panicked and jerked them down instead. While the sharp pain was more much intense, it was over almost immediately, leaving behind the nagging, itching, burning of a couple of hundred tiny dark points imbedded in tanned skin.

Completely tanned skin, I noticed. She stood between the open rear doors, her back to me, one hand cupped for privacy in front and the other fighting, and about to lose, a skirmish with her willpower that was telling it not to rub the places that hurt with the right hand that didn't hurt.

"Don't touch it!" I said. "You'll force them in deeper. If you do that, I don't know how I'll get them out." Duct tape, maybe, except we didn't have any.

Reluctantly, that hand joined its injured counterpart in its mission to provide lower cover and concealment in front.

I didn't see any skin that was untanned. Had she been sunbathing nude, holding her butt crack open to make sure everything tanned evenly? And I didn't see any tattoo, either.

"Uh, do you want me to get the thorns out of your hand or your tail first?"

Her only response was to move her left hand around to her side, then swing her arm back and up, and whimper softly.

I bent forward, stretched the skin taut with my left thumb and forefinger, and used the tweezers to remove one short black barb from her thumb near her wrist. This wasn't going to work. I needed a better angle to attack the problem. My choices were to kneel or to dislocate her shoulder. The latter wouldn't make her mother happy, so I knelt.

The asphalt wasn't kind to bare knees, even if it was in a shaded spot. I asked her to hand me the folded plastic tablecloth we'd spread over the picnic table. She hesitated and began to reach for it with alternate hands, finally deciding it would be less painful to risk humiliation and use the hand currently providing cover and concealment. Not that it mattered: I couldn't see around the wide, tanned globes in front of me.

That's not to say that she was turning into a big-butted woman. Until puberty she'd been like a wooden pencil. Now she was developing curves and bumps and dips that indicated she would turn into a clone of her mother. And there was nothing wrong with her mother's butt. Except, maybe, that Abby's had tan lines. Abby's tan lines were no more than two inches apart at the narrowest approach, but her butt had them.

I placed the folded plastic under my legs and took her hand to resume surgery. She complained when I pulled the next prickle out.

"If I stop to put the anti-itch cream on after every one I remove, we'll be here until breakfast."

"Well, do ... uh, something. Make it better!"

That was what she used to say when she was six and hurt. It was interesting the way she switched between the near-woman and the little girl. I couldn't think of anything else, so I did what I did for the little girl: I kissed the red spot where I'd removed the prickle, being careful not to press on the others with my lips and drive them deeper. "Better?" I asked, as I'd always done.

"Yeah," she said in a small voice. "Better." The near-woman was trying to regain control, though I heard a faint sniff.

Surgery resumed. I'd remove a few prickles, and then I'd kiss and ask if it was better whenever I saw the discomfort getting the better of her. I was at the center of her palm now, and it was especially sensitive. I continued, shifting my weight from time to time to adjust the strain on my knees. After about fifteen minutes, around the half-way point, I noticed that her thighs didn't quite meet before her legs joined her body, which caused me to notice two things: no tan lines and no tattoo. And no coppery-curly obstructions to the sight line, either.

I supposed that was a good sign under the circumstances. It would make finding the fragments of the stickers easier—I knew there were some because I could see them—and would make removal easier if there were no razor stubble. I didn't see any.

"Dad?"

I looked up. She was frowning at me over her shoulder. "You're checking me out again."

"No! I was looking at ... at the work left to do. At where all the stickers are. It's worse than I thought. The stickers, I mean. They're everywhere. They're all over ... everything."

I realized I was doing a Phoenix-babble and shut up. Besides, she knew better than I did that they were all over 'everything' as well as her butt.

To call her look 'skeptical' is to make it sound better than it actually was. "Don't you think you should, like, finish with my hand before you start enjoying the view?"

"Honey, honest! I was looking at the stickers. And, I guess, looking for the other tattoo. Okay, I noticed that you'd shaved ... everything ... but I was thinking about how that would make the finding and removal easier. Unless there's stubble left."

"Uh huh." She turned her head forward and shook it. It was the same tone and attitude I'd use with my dentist when he'd say we didn't need novocain because it wouldn't hurt.

"Honest!" I went after another fragment in her hand and slowly began removing it. "If I noticed anything it was that your butt looks like your mother's, but that's all."

She was silent for a moment, then spoke in a quiet voice. "You think it looks like Mom's?"

"Well, uh, yeah. You know. It's the same shape and size as hers at your age."

She whimpered when I removed the next fragment. I kissed it and asked if it was better.

"Uh huh. Better." She was quiet for the next couple of thorn fragments, so I foolishly thought she'd dropped the subject. "So," she said in the soft voice and the exact tone that Abby used when I was about to lose an argument, "you, like, saw Mom's butt when she was fifteen, did you?"

Despite the warning I said, "Yes," because I was distracted by the difficulty in getting a grip on a very short fragment. In fact, I didn't realize I'd heard the warning until she said, "So if it's, like, okay for you to look at Mom's butt when she's fifteen, then what's wrong with the Inkster seeing where he tattooed me? Like, he was doing his job, you know, and not being pervy getting his jollies checking me out like you with Mom."

I mentally ran through every expletive I knew. Twice. "Honey, I ... I don't know how to answer that. I can't think of the words. It's just different." I have to admit that I couldn't even convince myself that I wasn't lying. "Look, I think we're in the area where men and women don't communicate effectively. I can't translate it into girl-talk, and you don't understand man-speak yet. Maybe we should just wait and let your mother explain it."

"Uh huh." That downbeat tone again.

She was quiet until I said, "Only three more to go in your hand."

I expected anything except, "So, who has the better butt, me or Mom?"

Once again I had to wonder whether anything was not the wrong thing to say. I knew how competitive daughters were at this age. I was born between two sisters. If I said Abby did, then it would be an insult and maybe an injury to her self-esteem. If I said she did, then I was saying that I had been 'checking her out.'

"Well, if it looks like your Mother's at your age, then neither one looks better than the other."

"That is so not an answer."

No, but I was hoping that she'd think it was. Stupid me. That trick never worked with Abby, either. Maybe I should try an honest approach. "Honey, I don't know how to answer that without getting myself in trouble either way because you can misinterpret whatever I say."

"You're saying it's, like, Mom, then." Disappointment.

Okay, then Abby was the worst of the bad choices, and honesty wasn't the best policy.

"I didn't say that. See? You misinterpreted that, too."

"So you think mine is better?" Neutrality.

"Two to go. That's not what I said either. If I say it's yours, then you'll accuse me of checking you out again."

She said nothing.

I flicked a fragment from the tweezers. "Last one."

"Dad? I promise I won't get mad or, like, accuse you of being pervy or whatever."

"Well," I said, as she twitched her hand and I lost the grip on the spine fragment, "guess I'd have to say that since your mother's wasn't full of thorns, hers looked better."

"Uh huh. But, what if I, like, didn't have the thorns?" Hopefulness.

Okay, she was fishing for a compliment. "Maybe yours is just a teensy bit better."

"Uh huh." This time it was an upbeat sound. "Like, thanks."

"Done," I said, kissing her hand. "Better?"

"Yeah. Better. Except it, like, really itches."

I fished the tube of anesthetic goo out of the first aid kit and held it up for her. "If you rub this in yourself, I can get to work on the rest of them sooner. They have to be burning and itching pretty bad, too."

"Yeah. Um, Dad? I guess it's okay if you see my other tattoo."

She turned before I could reply. She hadn't completely shaved. She'd left a coppery postage-stamp-sized patch at the top of her crease. It was notched in one corner, and the notch held a tattoo of a small stick-figure man pushing a stick-figure lawn mower.

"Whose idea was the design?" I asked.

"Uh..." She had suddenly turned bashful. "Phoenix went, 'There's, like, room to cut a notch and have Inkster tattoo in this design I saw.' He'd seen the design on some website. So, when he did my ankle, I, like, had him do that one, too."

Phoenix. I suspected as much, since I saw no tan lines here, either.

"So, like, do you like it?" Hopefulness again.

"Honey, I don't like any tattoos, okay? It's just ... Look, can we talk about this later? Unless you like having those stickers in your skin?"

"Oh! Okay. Like, later." She turned around, and I pondered where to begin while she smeared the anti-itch goo in her hand and rubbed it in. Every place seemed like a worse place to start than the others.

"Dad, are you checking out my butt again?"

I glanced up. She was frowning over shoulder at me. "Honey, I told you. Well, actually, I guess maybe in this case I am. I'm checking out the best place to start. I'm not sure where to begin because everywhere looks like I might make it worse if my hands move wrong."

"Well," she said in Abby's patient 'It's a good thing you have a woman to think for you' voice, "then just start anywhere. Just hurry. It hurts, you know, and it's itching, too."

I shrugged. Out of the mouths of babes. "Okay. Here we go." I decided I'd just work my way from left to right. "You know I need to use one hand to stretch the skin while I pull, the way I did with your hand?"

"Daaaaaaaad! Hurry uuuuuuuup!" A tear crept out of one eye. I finally realized that she'd been hiding pain behind her brave voice.

"Okay," I said as I isolated one sticker between fingertip and thumb, spreading them slightly and grasping the dry invader with the tweezer tips. "I was trying to make sure I didn't get accused of feeling up your butt."

"No," she said in a small voice. "Not if you make it feel better. I promise."

The second time I adjusted the plastic tablecloth she again looked over her shoulder at me. "I'm sorry. I so forgot about your bad knees," she said. "I can, like, put those pillows on the back floor of the car here and kneel on them. Then you can stand up and work."

"That's a great idea," I said, thinking only about my knees. A minute later I saw the problem with her idea. With her on her hands and knees in the back of the SUV, butt facing outward, the problem was winking at me. However, there was a plus side of sorts: I finally found tan lines.

I placed my little fingers to steady my hands and stretched the skin for the next prickle.

"Dad?" I barely heard the quiet word.

"Yes, honey?"

"It hurts," she whined. "Make it better."

Great. This one was so short I could barely get a grip on it. "I'm working as fast as I can without making it worse, sweetie." Fortunately these were good tweezers. I had others that wouldn't be able to get any grip on the tiny piece remaining above the surface.

"No! Make it better like you did my haaaaaaaand."

"That's what I'm..." The tiny fragment came out as I realized what she meant. "Uh ... honey, I don't think Mom would like it if I kissed it."

"You kissed my hand."

"Sweetie, your hand isn't your butt. There's a difference."

"Wouldn't you kiss Mom's?"

I caught another prickle and slowly pulled. "Yes, but she's my wife."

"But I'm your daughter."

"That's the problem."

"Well..." She thought for a moment. "Mom's not here. You don't have to tell her. Daaaaaaaad! It hurts! Make it better?"

For a second I thought this one had broken off and left some under the tanned skin. I checked closely. No, I'd gotten it all. 'What the hell?' I thought and gave the cleared spot a drive-by kissing.