“A very clean dime.” He punctuates each word as he examines his find, then turns it over once and places it in his pocket. We’ve been walking in silence for a few minutes.

I’m fond of silence. Katie from Mississippi says she likes me because I don’t talk too much. It’s because I’m a Yankee, she says.

I’m a bad first date because in those moments of silence that other people scramble to fill, I recede into my mind and feel none of the discomfort, leaving all the burden of the scrambling on my date.

With my father, the silence fills the space around us like breath in a balloon, straining against the walls until one of us takes a pin and POP

“A very clean dime.”

• Creative