Lasts are inevitable with anyone, even people not yet introduced. Lasts occur like see-you-later fatalities, as a stolen glance never refreshed until all that remains is memory of a face like a faded photograph, a suggestion; or, in some cases, as nothing at all. The very last. Any particular person belongs to a Last and there is no avoiding it. Lasts are impossible to determine. One could be heartfelt, and just as easily, incredibly dull, even untraceable. And they cannot be anticipated, no, never. Storming out of a room after an argument with some bastard you swear to never see again still does not rule out a passing, knowing glance from him in the future.  
     
     A girl’s father left when she was only three years old. He never contacted the girl or her mother except through a monthly child support check that indicated he was some five thousand miles opposite the coast of California where they lived. Upon the fourteenth year following his split, this girl existed behind a drugstore register. She met customers with bright blue eyed genes left by the unmentionable figure, the "sperm donor" her mother called him. She could not even recall her Last with this man; at least, not in person. She had her own particular type, from the only photograph she'd seen of him that her mother once bitterly retrieved from a tattered shoebox in the closet.
     "Fine, fine, there he is, all yours," her mother said, handing over a Polaroid but not looking at it, eyes averted like a dieter’s passing a candy aisle. She promptly left the bedroom muttering about X chromosomes.

     The girl took the Polaroid, carefully, and studied it. Her mother hadn't lied, her blue eyes stared into the same pair of blues and his hair was colored dirty blonde, like hers, although he had a shaggy beard that seemed gruff at first glance, then more aloof. His mouth was curious; it appeared as though he was sharing a private joke, a kind of dark humor, amused by whoever it’d been behind the camera. Her eyes ate up the shoulders, neck and nose, moving slowly, savoring the pattern of his loose long-sleeved flannel. Dark purple, plaid, reminded her of eggplant. She flipped him over. Scrawled on the back: Devon, 1973. Her mind wandered into the fragment of time the photograph was taken. Had he already entertained the idea of leaving them?  
     Her mother devoted much sour energy toward the subject of the horrible, anonymous figure, in the similar fashion of a news anchor. Of course, much of the negativity was well-deserved, but in that one moment, as she clutched the image of her father, she forgot every single nonexistent birthday card, every meaningless Father's day. She swallowed up the Polaroid, felt it settle deliciously in her head. Her Polaroid father now stood next to stored mind-images of kaleidoscopic horizons and one particularly gorgeous stop light against a starstruck sky she'd seen six years ago, around four am, headed toward an airport in Los Angeles. His abandonment generated an unavoidable ugliness she found difficult to shake, but finally seeing him… the sperm donor, her father, this man in the picture, she concluded, was beautiful.  

     She saw the picture only once several years ago but each detail burned clear in her memory. Summer had arrived, she'd recently turned seventeen and now she was handing receipts to a crabby old lady at a check-out in a supermarket. She turned to the next customer, eyes turned downward, mumbling routine lines. Her hands swiped each item over a red laser beam, boop, boop, boop. Every customer she ever served had a temporary face, because after each shift, each one looked the same. Meshed together were impatient, bored eyes, arched eyebrows, curved lips, and various exasperated wrinkles that ultimately added up to the grand total of a dreary existence. It was just a hand over of money and receipts, identical questions and answers, the same cornball jokes from men with beady, penetrating stares. For this exact reason, she kept her head down for as long as she could go without appearing too hostile.

     As this customer dug into his wallet, she finally glanced up, indifferent as always. Her hands robotically moved a liter of soda.

     Every other part of her froze.

An employee's voice over the intercom, loud and commanding overhead like some sort of god, fell silent. The only sound she actually heard in the second she recognized the man's face was the
                                boooooooooopppp
of the passing soda container. The sound was so intense it imploded her ears while her chest thudded and continued thudding even when the surrounding noise resumed.

       In person.  

     Her eyes met his eyes, or, more appropriately, punched his eyes, really knocked them out with recognition. She stared so fiercely, a twelve-year-old boy standing next in line raised his eyebrows, unsure of what, exactly, he was witnessing. When she failed to utter the total, the man, her father, the sperm donor turned his head to see the numbers on the screen himself. He fished out a single bill and handed it to the counter.  
     Her hand stumbled forward. She slid the twenty into the register and collected his change with eyes wide like stage fright. As sure as she was his spitting image, he was the living, breathing version of the photograph. He coughed slightly into his left fist then unfolded it to receive the dollars in change. He recognized her as nothing more than a young girl with a part-time job; as remote as a missing person’s face on the back of a crumpled milk carton. He was completely oblivious to this First with his daughter. The customers shifted, took their places in line as her eyes trailed the back of his shaggy head that exited the automatic doors without one glance back.

That was the last of it; she decided then, the last of everything.