The note reads, “Dear Dad: I don’t like you. At all. And I never asked you to come visit. Dolly.” Dolly picked up her father at the Greyhound bus station. It was late afternoon. The parking lot was heavy with cars, some silent, others with their engines coolly purring, and yet others with their insides revving like a dog’s tail might wildly wag. On the damp sidewalk in front of the bus station, perfumed young ladies milled while waiting beneath a portico. Among them, a little girl in pigtails carried a stuffed toy baby at her side. There was loose stitching near the threadbare thing’s hip. Dolly could see cotton batting sticking out of this unprotected wound. The sky was charged. The sky was subtly electric. It had rained that afternoon and the rain could come again, and worse. As the ancient clock tower struck five o’clock, several more cars arrived and even more people began to assemble outside of their vehicles. They held gifts. One man held flowers, a vibrant purple. The women were smoothing their dresses, their skirts, their flyaway hair. These people were excited, each eagerly awaiting an arrival. Dolly stayed in her car. She stayed locked inside her car and she stared at the little girl, the one with the yellow pigtails, the one with the well-worn toy hanging limp at her side. Dolly stared and she thrummed her fingers on the steering wheel. She thrummed her fingers and simply waited, staring. By the time Dolly and her father arrived back at her modest two-bedroom apartment the sun had set. It was indeed raining again, a hard rain that punished the pavement. It was raining a torrent in the gutters that sounded like a box of nails emptied over and over onto a concrete floor. Dolly flipped on the entryway light and pointed to the bathroom at the dark end of the hall. Her father disappeared into it quietly. He went inside and Dolly heard the lock click. Then, as the shower spit water, its old pipes wavering behind the blue tile wall, Dolly left her apartment once more. Dolly walked through the rain to the supermarket. She walked all the way there and then she roamed the aisles of the supermarket. She picked up boxes of cereal, pretended to examine the nutritional content, then placed them neatly back on the shelf. She stopped in the middle of the freezer section. She stood right in the middle of those well-lit cases and she pored over the weekly circular. She saw coupons for discounted lemons and discounted frozen pizzas and discounted potato chips that she could get on sale. She clutched the sticky red handle of her shopping basket and she moved like molasses and quicksand down each lane of the supermarket. She was in no hurry. She put a loaf of white bread into the basket. She selected a six-pack of toilet paper. She oscillated between which color of toothbrush—blue or green—she should purchase before walking away from the display without either one. If she was doing these things she wasn’t thinking about her father. If she was staring at plastic soda pop bottles, noting their fizzy bubbles of carbonation, she wasn’t thinking about how her father had just arrived in a cough of exhaust. She didn’t want to think about his face, a face from the foggy past of her little girl childhood. If she was checking for the best expiration date on a sweaty gallon of milk, she wasn’t thinking about how they had the same pointed nose, the same ginger hair color, the same DNA coursing beneath their fair skin. When she could delay it no longer, Dolly returned home. Dolly returned home and she brought a swimming pool’s worth of water with her. Gallons belched from her ruined leather shoes as she walked down the hallway toward her front door. She dripped. From every inch of her she dripped. And that’s when she heard it: thunderous bass and a misshaped symphony of voices. First it was just bass. Then, it was the voices. Both rose. Both fell. Both rose and both fell with a tumbling vibration. It all came from behind Dolly’s front door. “Dolls, you remember the gang!” Her father said this as she came into the apartment. His hair was slicked back, gleaming. Filling her living room was a similar sort of slicked back company, though less gleaming. A blonde woman brushed her chest dangerous close to her father’s arm. The woman’s lipstick was too red, her skin too pale. Dolly noted a smudge of the red on the woman’s front tooth. “Dad?” The words formed, yet beneath the din they were simply drops in the ocean. Dolly’s mouth was only moving for show. Her paper sack, soggy and ragged, slid from her hands and burst open upon the floor. “We’re celebrating!” The blond woman howled this. She raised a pink party cup toward the ceiling. She raised it high. She raised the cup high and then brought it low. She took a giant swallow before smearing her lips upon the fresh shaven cheek of Dolly’s father. The party cup fell from the woman’s hand then. It fell down to the floor, the floor already covered in so many other cups just like it. Green cups, blue cups, red, yellow and purple cups lay scattered like fall leaves all over the living room floor. “Here’s to Charlie!” A stranger to Dolly’s left thrust his blue plastic cup toward the ceiling. Foamy beer slipped over its edge. “Here, here!” another voice boomed. The man beside Dolly drunkenly elbowed her in the ribs: “Sixteen years we knew he didn’t do nothing wrong. We didn’t never gave up! Tonight’s a good night, little lady!” “Charlie!” The blond woman is shrieking. Her father has his face planted deep within the curve of her chest. Dolly clamped her eyes shut to the sight, to the noise. When she opened them, her father was somehow standing beside her. “It’s just a little celebration, Dol,” he said. “I’m free. Finally. It’s a big deal.” And since Dolly could barely hear these words, since she could barely form conscious thoughts. She just stared at her father. She stared at that man and found herself slowly receding, drifting away out of the room, down the hallway, into her bedroom. The door slammed. The door slammed like her heart slammed in her chest, and Dolly crumpled to the safety of the floor. The note reads, “Dear Dad: I don’t like you. At all. And I never asked you to come visit. Dolly.” In the blue morning light of dawn, the nervous light of a new day still fledgling, Dolly sits with the note she’s just written. She sits in the corner of her bedroom and she studies it. It’s short. She wrote it without thinking. It didn’t even say what she’d really intended; the note didn’t even tell her father that she wanted him to leave. It didn’t say all of the things that she’d thought to say over all those years. Instead the message was blunt, choppy. Her handwriting was blunt and choppy, too. Each letter was set apart, and she was oddly proud of how strong and tall her capital letters seemed to stand. She was oddly proud of the bold black ink. Every letter stood firm, but then, curiously, she’d signed her name in cursive, like an old woman might sign a check at the grocery store. Dolly never writes in cursive. She likes how it looks now, however. Set beside the strong, tall capitals, the curves of her name announce themselves. The curves of her name are flippant, carefree. The curves of her name represent the girl she imagines she wants to be. Dolly folds the note in half. She folds the note in half horizontally and then in half once more, vertically. She creases the edges of the note with calm fingertips. The folds are secure. Her message is secure inside, held by walls of crisp white paper. Dolly is left with a small square the size of an old floppy disk. Dolly palms the note, shifting it around in her hands, running her fingers along its edges. It is a razor blade. She makes her bed. It is quiet in the hallway of Dolly’s modest two-bedroom apartment. It is still, unmoving. The door to the guest bedroom is closed. The bedroom door is closed and Dolly knows her father is asleep, just inches away on the other side. She holds the note tightly, now, clutching it in her right hand. A deep breath could send it under the door. A deep breath could send the message. But as she leans down close to the floor, her breath is stopped and her breath is caught. Her hand is stalled. There is already a note here. The note reads, “Dear Dolly: I have missed you so much. So much. And I’m so grateful that you have let me come visit. Dad.” There are fresh flowers on the kitchen table. A black plastic trash bag beside the front door is all that remains of last night’s welcoming party. And so Dolly is standing in the center of her spotless living room. Dolly is standing in the center of her spotless living room and she is tearing her small note into tiny pieces. She shreds the paper with her bare hands. Each tear is smaller than the next. Each tear obliterates the message inside. And the pieces, merely flecks of simple paper, sprinkle down from her hands to the floor. The pieces fall and scatter around her. They fall and they scatter, they scatter like one hundred party cups left behind by uninvited guests. —Matthew Allard, June 15, 2009				Uninvited Guests 2008 ink and watercolor on paper 6 x 6"