The evening birds were beginning their song, but the meadowlarks were still signaling to each other, and the mosquitoes weren't bad yet.
We started the loop going clockwise, aiming first for the bridge that crosses what once was the Burlington Ditch.
I only learned that becuase my dad — voracious history reader that he is — insisted on stopping at every. single. historical. plaque.
So I read with him.
I showed him the trees that, for me, are the scent of Wyoming summers.
He thought they were Russian olive. I'm still not sure.
We ambled around the curve, making small talk.
This had been my mom's idea, and I felt bad that I hadn't thought of it first.
"Sarah, I want you to spend more time with your dad. Just you and him. Go do something together. Anything."
Dad isn't chatty anymore. You have to really pry things out of him, and he's not much for the outdoors anymore, either. I've gotten comfortable doing things with Mom, or with Mom and Dad.
Weekends came and went, and there was always something else that came up.
A trip to Montana.
A date.
A girls' weekend in the Black Hills.
And then it was Father's Day weekend.
I told him Friday night, over sushi and hibachi, that we'd go walking the next day, but I overslept and he didn't want to go later in the day.
Late Sunday, as I was in the midst of an insanely long walk, Mom called.
Dad was ready to go.
I picked him up, and we headed for the lake.
"We don't have to do the whole loop, Dad," I said. "We'll go as far as you want. You feeling OK?"
He said he was, and I could already hear the irritation in his voice that I would ask. He was irritated that I'd made him grab a jacket on his way out of the car.
He wouldn't let me bring the bug repellant.
"Bugs don't dare bite me," he said.
I wasn't going to argue with him.
"Have you been here since they paved the walkway?" I asked.
"No," he said, later pointing to a gravel path that led off near the gun range.
"The path used to be all that stuff," he said.
He remembered that, at least.
We talked about when the city used to shoot fireworks there, and we'd spend the Fourth of July at a friend's house nearby, and his neighbors called the cops on us for shooting "illegal" fireworks.
He chuckled.
Did he still feel OK?
He did.
He pointed to a mound of dirt rising into the lake's newest manmade island.
"I don't remember that," he said.
"They just made that this spring," I told him.
We'd learned about how the geese here had been transplanted from Keyhole, and how the lake had been dredged to a depth to hold water year-round and been designated a waterfowl area. We'd read about the city's unsuccessful attempt to ban dogs from the lake during nesting seasons, and Dad swore there had been a similar "act of stupidity" for the Fishing Lake.
He stopped to admire the pump house and to read a few more plaques.
This fellow who did such-and-such so many years ago and was the great-grandfather of that city official; this couple whose homestead had abutted the acreage that now made up the park where we now walked a slow circle.
We talked about one of his therapists. He's a little tender over all his doctors and therapists. I think he resents them sometimes.
He really likes his cognition therapist, though. She's personable. She doesn't judge him. There aren't any wrong answers to her questions.
His legs were tired, so he was going to sit down.
Did he feel OK?
He did, and he said so with a sigh.
We sat and watched starlings take flight out of the grass and trees.
"Do you think we startled them?" I asked him.
"I don't think that's our fault," he said. "I think it's their bedtime."
We talked a bit about whether birds have curfew and how if we waited long enough, we'd see pairs of geese flying in from the northeast, honking their arrival.
Dad didn't want to wait around for that, so we got up and walked a bit more.
We were at the halfway point. Whether we turned around or forged ahead, it was the same distance.
He shrugged.
"Might as well finish," he said, looking ahead to a shaded curve full of more of those fragrant trees.
I told him about the deer, antelope, ducks, geese, snake and skunk I'd seen here.
He laughed when I told him how, in the low daylight and flashing lightning of an approaching storm, I'd mistaken the skunk as a funky-looking squirrel.
"Then I realized it was NOT a squirrel. Definitely not a squirrel."
He wanted to know if I'd seen any beaver or muskrat houses.
I said no, not wanting to admit that I was more than fine with that. My last almost-encounter with a muskrat had been a terrifying midnight act of idiocy at Keyhole when I was a teenager, when the quiet but suspicious paddling of water got closer and closer to my legs as I stood holding a flashlight for my friends who were swimming in the dark.
I hadn't been able to stand in a lake in the dark since then.
I didn't tell him any of that. I just told him to let me know if he saw any beaver or muskrat houses.
We took a couple more breaks, and we watched a glorious sunset together.
We got up, and I made him a promise: Finish this lap, and we'll go get ice cream.
Deal.
It took an hour, but we finished the loop and walked back to the car.
The sun was no longer up, and the brilliant colors had faded to smoky grays and whites.
Dad said his legs were worn out.
I told him he couldn't complain, since I'd done 7½ miles before I picked him up.
We got to the McDonald's drive-through, where I handed him his sweet reward.
He began devouring it. INHALING it.
Halfway home, I looked over. His cone was more than half gone.
"You worried Mom'll take it away from you?" I asked, laughing.
"Mmm-hmmm," he grunted, crunching into the cone.
I turned onto their street, and he brushed the crumbs from his hands.
As I put the van into park in the driveway, Dad looked at my cone.
"Lemme see that for a second," he said.
I sighed, bidding a silent farewell to my treat, sure that Dad was going to finish my cone, too.
He held it for a few seconds, staring at it, looking perplexed.
Then he handed it back to me.
"Huh," he said.
Now perplexed myself, I looked at my cone.
"What?" I asked.
"Well, I just wondered," he said.
"What??" I asked, again, getting a little worried.
"Well, there really WAS a wrapper on that cone."
I looked at him.
He looked at my cone.
I started laughing.
"You ate the wrapper?"
He shrugged.
"I thought it was a little chewy."
I laughed harder.
"You ATE the WRAPPER?!???"
"Oh, well ... No evidence for your mom to get mad at me," he said.
And that's the story of my Father's Day Sunset Walk and the tale of how there remained no evidence that my dad had indulged in a Father's Day ice cream cone.
