where the hell is dad?

we have a special needs patron in a wheelchair that comes to the library once a week, on saturdays, with her father. he is divorced and we figure he has his daughter on the weekend. she is a teenage girl, with gross motor skill difficulties. her wheelchair is not motorized, so she has to steer it by dragging her feet. she has a hard time using her hands. she needs a lot of help. and, she drools. over everything. gross, spitty drool on the computers, books, tables, herself. she is one frustrated kid. why? because her dad plops her in the middle of the children's room and splits. he'll just walk away, go outside, use our computers, talk on the phone and do anything but care for his daughter. today, the girl had to ask two patrons for help...and she is hard to understand and she is very loud and demanding. the children's librarian followed her around for 45 minutes, picking up after her, getting things off higher shelves, moving chairs so she could navigate, setting her up on a computer and wiping drool off every surface and item she touched and discarded. and where was the dad? well, he was looking up womens' singles listings on the computer AND calling a woman on his cell phone to make a date for the movies for that night. at one point in the phone conversation he said he would meet the women at the theater "in 20 minutes". he then collected his daughter, we checked out her spit drenched items, and he left. we were all wondering if he was taking his kid with him to the movies on a date, no less, or is he dumping her off somewhere first? and, this is going to sound cruel but, would you show up to a date with your child, especially a special needs teenager? if that happened to you, how would you handle it? i know it would not be the cool or compassionate thing to do, but i would suddenly come down with the flu and split!

we all feel bad for this girl because she has such a useless dad (who has berated her for forgetting to rewind videos many times, among other things), but we are also frustrated because we are left to do the babysitting. is it really so hard for him to spend 45 minutes with his daughter?