Daddy's Little Girl, One Last Time

Growing up I was truly daddy's little girl. He called me 'mami' for a long time, a term of endearment in Puerto Rico culture and not necessarily a term for your mother. But we moved to El Paso and my new friends made fun of me and I eventually asked him to stop calling me mami. At some point in my teenage years I completely Americanized and stopped calling him Papi and began to call him Dad. At that point, I guess he acclimated as well and started calling me sweetheart. There are glimpses in my life that I can remember my dad as a little girl should. Dad taught me how to ride a bike, dad took us camping, tobogganing, to the park. He built a bunk like bed with a desk under it for me from scratch and even built my mouse a super decked-out condo with two floors and four rooms. He brushed my hair when I was little while singing 'You Are My Sunshine' to me. He walked me to school on snow-filled Chicago mornings where we would talk about everything, usually in Spanish. He was the bees knees.
Dad stopped calling me sweetheart when his disease started to set in. My mom has it documented, I called her one day years ago to tell her, my dad had yelled at me and called me Erica instead of sweetheart. That's when I was no longer his sweetheart and also when he started getting mean (often a first sign).
On Sunday I forced him to walk in the desert with me, he asked "you're not going by yourself are you?" and I responded "Nope, you're coming with me". My momma couldn't join because she has a wicked ankle sprain she got hiking the Davis Mountains last week. He started again "please don't do this, please don't make me go, I really don't want to leave (your mother)" and after multiple pleads, I won and he stomped out the door, 20 feet in front of me, grudgingly down the road. Once in the desert, he still didn't talk, his energy was still yucky and I was in for a long morning. After about twenty minutes and surfing through multiple favorite topics, he started to talk about Jimmy V.-childhood friend/mafioso. We walked and talked for a long time, up and down the mountains of cacti and rocks, I in my thin tennis shoes, him in his hiking boots. He yelled down the hill to me at one point "tennis are just as good as hiking boots Erica, come on!", shit talking was always his forte. I followed far behind as the rocks fell down into my path. He was totally oblivious to anything surrounding him, including his struggling daughter in flimsy shoes. I was happy none-the-less, happy to have him out of the house, happy my momma could have some time to breathe. I kept going because I finally wasn't fighting him, he was in a zone, happy and free.
There was a hill, a big hill, I couldn't get up cause the rocks kept slipping behind him. He reached down, offered his hand and said "Here sweetheart, give me your hand, I'll help you up". He did and we made it up the hill still holding hands like father and daughter. I was daddy's little girl, one last time.