The great escape

CINDERELLA IS bolting the castle. She’s taking those funky lime-green shoes and her hand-me-down luggage off to her own apartment on the other side of town. It’s 20 minutes on the freeway. Four hours at rush hour. Not bad.

“Dad, will you help me load the U-Haul?”

“No.”

“Please?”

“Yeah, all right.”

A year ago, we loaded a faded U-Haul truck and brought our lovely and patient older daughter home from college. Now, after a year on the job, she’s able to afford her own place. In a few years -- maybe 20 -- she’ll buy her first house. It’ll cost a cool $4 million, a fixer with questionable schools. It’d be $6 million for anything she’d really like.

“Dad?”

“Huh?”

“We’re moving the couch now.”

Hey, that’s my couch. I love that couch. I think we conceived two kids on that couch, then fed them bottles late into the night. We watched 14 Academy Awards on that couch. Waited for her to come home from prom. The hamster had hamsters in that couch. On second thought: Go ahead, take the couch.

“Can I have that lamp too?” she asks.

“No,” says her mother.

“We’ll find you another lamp,” I say.

I always liked this kid. She was earnest in her schoolwork, faithful to her friends, good with new technology, smart with a buck.

Now she’s going. Broke my heart when she went off to college, but I knew she’d be back. This? This could be permanent. She could be gone for good. Or for bad. Could be gone forever.

I wonder if she’ll miss any of it. Little things, like the smell of her mother’s kitchen, the way she burns the bacon just right. Little things, like the sight of her little sister, combing-combing-combing her satiny hair all day.

Little things, like that leprechaun who prances around the house as if he owns the joint. No, not me. The other leprechaun, her baby brother, who smeared cupcake on the car door the other morning. The one who includes the Clippers in his evening prayers. The one with the raspy Little Rascals voice and hair like copper thread.

I wonder if she’ll miss my Gordon Lightfoot albums. Or my scratchy Miles Davis.

“That could be the very reason she’s leaving,” my wife notes when I mention the music.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

At least she’s taking that dog of hers, the one who thinks his head is his fanny and his fanny is his head. For weeks, after she brought him home from college, I wondered why the little beagle kept thumping into doors and sitting in his dog dish. Turns out he had these head-fanny issues. HFD, they call it. Head Fanny Disorder. Once I understood that, I was OK. I now contribute annually to the Head Fanny Institute. They do a lot of important work there.

“I’ll miss that dog,” I say.

“No, you won’t.”

“He has a big heart,” I say.

“And a very tiny brain,” my daughter says.

“He has a brain?”

“Daaaad!”

So she’ll load him in the car, leaving for good -- or for bad. To her tiny apartment she’ll go, with our old couch with the popcorn in the cushions. Grandma sent her money for the security deposit. Her brothers gifted her a nice hug. In this town, she’ll need lots

of both -- hugs and money -- hugs being tougher to find.

“She’s moving out?” her brother asks.

“She just moved in,” I note.

“That was 22 years ago,” my wife explains.

My daughter doesn’t know it yet, but her mother might be moving with her. It won’t be noticeable at first. Her mother will just seem to be there a lot, putting up curtains and organizing knife drawers. Then my daughter will realize her mother is living there full time, up late watching those dopey medical shows she adores.

“She comes with the couch,” I tell my daughter.

“Dad, she’s not moving in with me,” she says, a little more seriously than you would like.

“Your mother has a lot of nice qualities,” I say.

“She does?”

“About a billion,” I say.

Fortunately, the lovely and patient older daughter isn’t going far. Close enough that I can pop in now and then. Every Sunday for a ballgame. Wednesday nights for pizza and poker.

Not too often. Just to be sure she’s OK. Like when she was a baby and I’d drop by her room just to watch her sleep -- my freckly Cinderella, my rhapsody in shoes.

For 22 years, we supported her. Twenty-two years -- fleeting as a handshake, profound as a Christmas poem.

Now the U-Haul heads down the cul-de-sac.

We’re suddenly back to three again.

Kids. They come, they go. But do they ever really leave?

Next week: The lovely and patient older daughter says goodbye.