Did you ever hear the story about pennies from heaven? The theory is that every time you find a penny somewhere unexpected — lying on the street, or on the floor in your house, or on the sandy beach next to the blanket you’re sunning yourself on — it’s a sign from someone you love who has passed on, trying to tell you from heaven that they love you. Pennies from heaven. It’s nice, right? We want to believe it could be true. Even if we think it’s silly.

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Dad sent me a stupid effing quarter. He never could stick to just being like everybody else.

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I live in Virginia. My dad died last year of Covid in a New York State nursing home, in a town next to the town where I grew up, in the same house my father grew up in before me. He’d been in the nursing home about two years, and losing it for a bit before then, although it was hard to tell with the way he drank. Dementia and drunk look a lot alike when someone is over eighty. Dad finally had some kind of incident while doing yard work in the hot sun. Eighty-two years old, sweating in the hot sun after having had the flu a few days before, his wife said. Bottle flu, I’d say, although the wine at my father’s house always came in a box, and the beer in a can.

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My dad was a sailor. Not by trade, but by vocation. Not through his whole life, but for big swaths of it. He joined the Coast Guard right out of high school. (I remember the picture that always sat in my grandparents’ living room, Dad in his Coast Guard uniform, my uncle in his Air Force dress blues. Both looking impossibly young.) He found a job right out of the Coast Guard that he worked until he retired in his late fifties. But after that, he was a salty dog. Right up until the middle of his seventh decade on earth. By then, the sweat from the yard work he was always doing on the property he loved, and an unfathomable amount of alcohol, had diluted the salt in his veins that used to call him to Lake Erie, or inspire him to spent hours fixing and fussing over various boats during the time of the year he couldn’t be on the water.

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He had other passions that took up his time when I was growing up. He was a championship pistol shooter, for one. Medals and trophies galore. The only vacations we ever took involved him dragging us to some pistol match, where we’d watch him outshoot everybody else and we’d camp out in a field somewhere in our pop-up trailer. One memorable place featured a lake full of giant leeches. We didn’t go swimming.

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He also enjoyed drinking and cheating on my mother, and treating her badly, and leaving her for someone only five years older than his kids, and being somewhat indifferent to his children, and eventually — finally — marrying the woman he cheated with twenty some years later. I admired her persistence.

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I loved my dad. I really did. But there were parts of him I wished I hadn’t had to love. Such is the way of life, and of death, too. And the way of fathers who aren’t the best fathers, but aren’t the worst, either. Nobody is perfect. I even came to love my father’s wife, although that changed later.

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The last year has been tough for everybody: the country, the world. I’m not asking any sympathy for my pain when so many people have their own, even though my tough year has really been three years. (Okay, maybe a little bit of sympathy.) Twenty-twenty was supposed to be the turn-around year. That didn’t happen, obviously, but it’s better now, and I have great hope for the future. I’m a big believer in stoicism. And gallows humor; that helps too. Did you hear the one about death walking into a bar with a priest and a rabbi?

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Never mind; I digress.

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Dad always loved sailboats. He had a dragon painted on one of his boats and thought that was “neater than shit,” to quote him. He loved to zip around the lake on that boat, and sit in the marina and drink on it, too. He loved wooden boats. He could navigate with a sextant. He even took a course and earned his Captain’s license, which is no small feat.

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He and I took a trip once, across the lake to Port Colborne, Ontario to see the Tall Ships Festival. He was such a ship nerd. We were walking down the pier there, and a ship was coming in for the festival; a big clipper ship with three masts and I don’t know how many sails (Dad would know), that seemed like it had sailed in from another time. They were throwing down the lines, and Dad ran over to help catch them, and he was just so thrilled to help a bunch of young sailors tie up a tall ship that I thought he would burst. Another time, I encouraged him to sign on to a sailing ship going up the St. Lawrence to the Bay of Fungi, and eventually down to Aruba, after I found the advertisement for crew in a magazine. He always thought I was super smart, and brave, and bold. “Do it, Dad,” I said. “You know you want to. Just do it.” I knew he needed a little push to be brave enough to go, and I gave him that. So he went.

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I knew my father very well. But he didn’t know me. I kind of wish he had bothered to, when I think about it now, but it is what it is.

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Once he spent a summer in Maine, buying an old wooden trawler and making it seaworthy, and then bringing it home: down the coast from Maine to New York, up the Hudson River, through the Erie Canal to Buffalo, and then down the lake to Dunkirk. My brother went to Maine and rode the boat with Dad from there to the canal. I met Dad for a few days of the slow slog down the canal. We drank together and pretended we weren’t lying to his girlfriend (her persistence hadn’t paid off yet) about his drinking, and we talked about everything under the sun that intrigued us. The kind of things that I never found anybody else to talk to about, and that everyone else in the family wrote off as the weird stuff that only me and dad would be interested in. Because I am my father’s daughter, in more ways than I’m comfortable admitting to most of the time.

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I got off the boat in Buffalo, and my brother got back on for the lake trip to Dunkirk. A terrible storm came up, and a two-hour trek turned into ten. My brother was almost washed off the boat. A friend of my father’s had come along for the ride and reached out and grabbed my brother, and pulled him back from the wave that was about to sweep him off the line he was holding and into the Great Lake that has killed thousands of people over the centuries. That was Dad, too. Secure the lines on someone else’s clipper ship, but not on your own kid.

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The trawler never worked out well for my father. He took it out of the water to do some repairs, and it never made it back in until years later, when he sold it to someone else who finished the work. Dad went back to a small sailboat he could whip around the waves, until he finally took that out of the water, too, and it sat in the yard and overlooked my father as he spent his time fussing with his pond and the creek that ran down the side of his property. Safer water for an old man than wrestling with the waves and weather on the Great Lakes. I think his wife was tired of the sailing life. I blame her for a lot, but I can’t blame her for that. I think Dad missed it, but maybe he was happy to just daydream about the places he’d never sailed to, and have her to say no, they weren’t putting the boat back in the water.

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We connected on a weird level, my dad and me. He wasn’t a great dad. I can say that now. I said it a lot after he died. I said it to him then — even though he was dead — because I never wanted to hurt him by saying it to him when he was alive. I said it in the shower, where I sometimes cried when I was feeling lower than low about everything that had happened before he died, and while he died, and after he died.

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I used to give my dad interesting presents. Silver spoons shot by Annie Oakley, pictures of Winston Churchill, an authentic shipwreck coin from the 1700s. A hand-carved rosewood dragon cane that reminded me of the dragon painted on one of his sailboats. Once I bought him a big, antique art nouveau copper plaque of a maple leaf that looked like it had been pulled off a building façade. He sent me a picture when it was delivered: him wearing a funny cap, smiling while he held up the plaque like a shield, an antique sword in his other hand, looking like a garden gnome going to war. He loved weird stuff, like I do. Or maybe I should say I love weird things, like he did. I bought him a pre-WWII wooden target carved into the shape of a falcon, from a shooting club in Europe where he’d toured as a championship shooter, and an antique Simurgh figurehead from a boat. Water lilies like Monet’s, to grow in his pond. A pound of seed to grow a ginseng patch. I once gave him an Indiana Jones hat — beaver felt, the best one I could find. The birthday card I gave him with it played the movie’s theme song when it was opened. He took the little device that played the tune out of the card and positioned it in the fedora so that when he tipped his hat to people, the music played. That was my dad.

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He usually gave me a check for present-giving holidays, written out by his wife, with a card she signed for him.

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My dad was exceptionally talented. An artisan. Someone who could make or build things that no one else would think to do. He remodeled the house I grew up in, with an apartment for himself and his girlfriend that had a hand-carved snake banister he made from the trunk of a tree he found in the woods, and an antique Japanese glass fishing net float he built into a wall as a glowing green light. I found out years later — long after he’d left that house — that he’d hidden a time capsule full of old family photographs behind the bar he built in the living room. There were boats he renovated himself, custom gun grips that would fit your hand like a glove, and walking sticks with bird heads. A Viking horn pounded out from a copper pipe that took days to make, because he saw some actor in an old movie blowing one. Too many things to list, all just because he thought those things were cool and worth doing. The horn is one of the few things I have from him. I saw it decades after he’d made it, squirreled away at his house, and I asked him for it. I never asked for much, but the horn spoke of the person he was. It makes a loud noise, just like my father did.

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I see myself in the similar things that I do. The subjects I study; the art that I make. My father gave me that. Maybe that’s worth more than teaching me how to drive, or knowing I can write, or ever recognizing who I am.

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I loved my dad. I really did. You would have liked him. Everyone did. He’d help you cut down a tree or clean the duck poop off your dock; or he’d fix your furnace or the motorcycle saddlebags you broke in a fall. He was good for always offering a beer, and sitting and drinking one with you, or spending a day helping to half-bury an old bathtub in your yard to make a shrine to the Virgin Mary. All you had to do was ask.

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I don’t know what happened to all the things I gave my father. I don’t even know where my father is. His wife had him cremated instead of putting him in the family plot he told me he hoped to be buried in, where my grandparents are. That’s her right. She might have thrown his ashes in the creek that runs through their property, for all I know. She hasn’t spoken to me in years, since right after my father lost his mind, because, I’m told, she couldn’t put up with me asking any questions about what was happening with him. She deigned to speak to my brother instead, and my brother would speak to me. My brother waited till the day before my father passed away to call and tell me he was sick with Covid, and about to die.

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The second time I saw Dad in the hospital after he lost his mind, my husband sat in a room down the hall for hours and waited for me, so I could spend some time alone with my father. I went to the hospital prepared, with my computer tablet and a downloaded movie about Churchill for us to watch together. I thought that maybe if Dad were distracted, he wouldn’t act angry and crazy. Maybe I could pretend his mind wasn’t gone, and that he was still the father I’d always known, and he’d tell me the story about Churchill’s pistol he’d told me a dozen times before.

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He wasn’t having any of the movie-watching idea. He was agitated. He didn’t know where he was. He thought he’d been kidnapped. He told me what he needed was for me to sit and listen to what had happened to him, so I did. I’d been listening to my father’s stories my whole life.

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Most of it was crazy talk. He’d been on a boat. He’d been kidnapped. Someone had beat him up. He wanted me to give him money because he didn’t have any, and he might need some to leave later. He didn’t trust the nurses.

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I listened, but I talked, too. I sang the praises of the nurses, who my stepmother had said told her not to visit. I told him he should stay where he was for a while, until he was better; and I lied and told him that his wife would be coming to see him later. In between the crazy talk, brief glimpses of my father were still there. He remembered the water, and his sailboats. How they used to sail on the lake, and the places they’d gone. And he talked about the sailboat he still had, sitting on the trailer parked at home. He told me that as soon as he got out of the hospital, he was going to take a look at the boat and see what it needed, and fix it up so he could get back on the water. I asked him where he would go. He looked surprised for a moment, like he hadn’t really thought about that, and then he smiled and said, “Into the sunset. I’m going to sail off into the sunset and see where it takes me.”

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Right after he died (just a few months after my mother died in a different nursing home), I was standing in front of my bedroom window, which has a long, padded ledge attached to the windowsill for our cats to sit on. The window overlooks the deck on the back of our house, which was empty at the time because I’d been too depressed to think about hauling out the deck furniture from its winter storage in the garage. I didn’t want to sit in the spring sunshine. Mom was dead, Dad was dead. My twin brother and I weren’t really speaking.

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I looked down at the empty deck and I saw something lying there, glinting in the sun. What was it? Neither I nor my husband had been on the deck for weeks. We were in the middle of the pandemic lockdown; we hadn’t had anybody over to the house in months. There were no stairs off the deck for someone to climb up and leave something; the only access is from the second story of our house. The deck was totally empty, just the weathered wood decking stretched out in planks, and whatever it was that I was seeing, lying there.

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I stood at that window probably every day, looking at the trees in the back yard, and down at the deck; brushing Maisie or twiddling Luna’s ears and wondering how I could manage to stop being a depressed, morose, bitter pain-in-the-ass who was driving my patient and understanding husband crazy by sitting around all day, wondering why life had crapped on my head. There hadn’t been anything on the deck the day before. Where had it come from?

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The sun hit whatever it was again, and it practically glowed. I went down the stairs and out onto the deck.

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It was a quarter. The equivalent of twenty-five of those stupid pennies from heaven. Who knows how it got there? Maybe trees are growing and shedding money onto houses now. When I picked it up, I saw it was a state quarter from Rhode Island.

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State quarters were a ten-year program, started in 1999. The U.S. Mint issued quarters that honored each state, in the order that the states ratified the constitution or were admitted to the union. Each coin was produced for about ten weeks and would never be produced again. Rhode Island’s quarter was issued in 2001.

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You know what’s on a Rhode Island state quarter? A sailboat. There’s no sunset illustrated on the quarter, but I like to imagine that the sailboat on that quarter is sailing off into the sunset, and the captain of that boat is just seeing where the sunset will take him.

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Am I imagining things? Is it just a coincidence? The mint made $217.53 million worth of Rhode Island quarters in two weeks, nineteen years before I found one on my empty porch in 2020. People see what they want to see and interpret meaning in things that perhaps have no meaning. I’m sure someone smarter than me can calculate the odds of finding that quarter gleaming in the sunshine on my deck a few weeks after my dad died. But not me. I’ll settle for what I can get. I spent my whole life settling for what I could get with my father.

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You know how I said I am my father’s daughter, more than I’m usually willing to admit? And that he and I talked about weird stuff that nobody else was interested in? One of the things we’d talked about over the years, over many glasses of terrible, boxed zinfandel that I wished had been good, bottled wine, was death. Whether there was something afterward. And since he was probably going to die before me, that he should send me a sign if he got to the afterlife. To let me know that I’d see him again.

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I’m still pissed at my dad. Even that quarter pissed me off. I stuck it somewhere. I can’t remember where, exactly, because even though it helped me out of my funk a little bit, I’m angry that it showed up to make me wonder if my dad would ever have been capable, even with the enlightenment death might bring, of thinking about the daughter he loved as best as he knew how — which wasn’t all that well — long enough to send her a sign.

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Somewhere in the cluttered arrangement that is the desk where I write, and the table next to it, with a shelf stuffed with books, and tchotchkes, and decorative little boxes filled with spare buttons and earring backs, and beads I mean to string, I put that quarter. Occasionally it shows up somewhere I am searching, even though I am not looking for it. And it makes me think of my dad.

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And that’s okay. Because I loved my dad. I really did.