WILD ROSE, Wis. – Sometimes, Richard Nary admits, he misses "the boys" back in Sacramento, the ones who drank beer with him, brought him plates of pasta and made sure he survived cold and rainy nights inside a cardboard box behind a busy Shell gas station.

Maybe he will visit them one day, he says. But for now, he is content to be surrounded by family, in a town so small it has no stoplights and so remote that he can hear the rustle of wild turkeys and deer as he sits poolside, smoking his Pall Malls and sipping Cokes.

"It doesn't get better than this," Nary, 68, says on a recent afternoon, a Green Bay Packers cap perched on his head as he watches his great-grandson Gaje toddle around him. "This is the life, isn't it?"

It is a scenario he never imagined a year ago, when he was a broken, homeless alcoholic who had given up hope of seeing his five children again.

His new life is playing out in the home of his youngest daughter, Krista Szymborski, who has pushed aside her bitterness toward a father who more than 30 years ago abandoned his family in New York. In January, with the help of a man who had rescued Nary from the streets, she flew to Sacramento and saw her father for the first time since she was a child. Then she brought him home.

Nary now lives with Krista and her husband, Craig, in a caramel-colored house on 4 acres of land in Wild Rose, a town of 765 people where farmers sell their bounty on an honor system at roadside stands. In their home north of Madison, he has a spacious upstairs bedroom with a flat-screen TV, a refrigerator full of food and the constant companionship of long-lost relatives and friends.

"All of his wants and needs are covered," says Szymborski, 39.

Yet this is no simple "happily ever after" story. Not yet, at least. Father and daughter have clashed over their lifestyle differences, including his insistence on smoking in the house, his salty language, his stubborn refusal to see a doctor for a checkup and his alcohol consumption. Each day is a reminder of ghosts of the past, but Nary's abandonment of his family is not a topic that he and Szymborski have discussed in detail.

Nary blames the bottle for his decision to leave his wife and children so many years ago, and has regrets.

"But the past is the past," he says. "It's best to let it go."

That has been easier said than done for Szymborski and her siblings, most of whom have been reluctant to fully accept him into their lives.

"They saw and remember more than I did," Szymborski says of her older brothers and sisters. "As kids, we had a hard life because of him."

She will never forget the pain and poverty that her father's absence inflicted on the family, she says. But she is working on forgiveness.

"I'm not angry at him anymore," she says. "Finding my father has filled a void inside of me that I didn't even realize I had."

• • •

The seeds for their unlikely reunion were planted last summer, when Nary was spending his days drowning in booze and his nights inside a cardboard box in the parking lot of a Sacramento service station.

A military veteran who over the years worked as a trucker, welder and horseman, Nary depended on the kindness of strangers for survival. Staffers and customers of a nearby restaurant, Buca di Beppo on Howe Avenue, looked after him, brought him food and knocked down a few beers with him now and then.

Although he thought about his family over the years, he says, he had seen them only a few times, mostly at funerals. He believed he would die on the streets with all of his bridges burned.

Then he met Todd Reiners, a computer specialist for The Bee who spotted him at the Shell station one day. The two began talking, and Reiners soon moved Nary into his home and began searching for his relatives.

He found Szymborski on Facebook. It turned out she had been looking for her father for years.

In January, she and her husband flew to Sacramento to see Nary and encountered a frail man with a scraggly gray beard wearing borrowed clothes and shoes two sizes too big. "I never planned on bringing him home," she says. "My husband and I were looking forward to the empty nest," with their two children out of the house. "But I couldn't leave him there."

During their first few weeks together in Wisconsin, they spoke only about mundane things like the weather and dinner plans. Nary refused to unpack all of his clothes, grumbled about the frigid Midwestern weather and spent most of his time in his upstairs bedroom.

Gradually, they became closer. The Szymborskis arranged for him to see his children, brothers, sisters and cousins around the country, and introduced him to his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. So many people have come into his life recently, he says, that he cannot remember everyone's names.

Father and daughter tease each other relentlessly, watch "Jeopardy" together and talk about everything except the reasons he abandoned his family. Szymborski prepares Nary's meals, buys him jelly donuts, pays his bills and fights his battles with the Social Security Administration. She takes him for long drives in the country and to Walmart to buy gifts for his great-grandson.

"It's nice and peaceful here," says Nary, who remains thin and gaunt with a flyaway beard. "My daughter takes pretty good care of me."

But Szymborski also has strict rules. "I call her the warden," Nary jokes.

• • •

"You twisted my arm to get me here," he says on a recent day, recalling his first winter in Wild Rose. "But I may just get on a plane and go to Hawaii this winter."

"Oh really, Dad?" Szymborski replies with a smile.

"Nah, I ain't going anywhere."

Szymborski takes her "warden" role seriously. She limits her father to three beers a day, placing them in the refrigerator before she leaves for work at an insurance office. "Otherwise, he would drink and drink," she says.

Daily, he violates her "no smoking" rule inside the house, but he confines that habit to his bedroom. She chides him for his bad language, rolls her eyes at some of his stories and corrects his revisionist view of her childhood.

"He'll talk about taking care of us, and I remind him that he didn't do that," she says. One of her enduring childhood memories is hiding under the bed from her raging, drunken father.

All four of Szymborski's siblings have spoken to Nary since he moved to Wisconsin, but none have been eager to be close to him.

"When he left us, I was relieved," says Nary's eldest daughter, Robin Blakeslee, who still lives in New York. "He was an alcoholic and abusive toward my mom, and things happened that I probably will never forget.

"Sure, we grew up poor. We had to share clothes and shoes. My mom was working all the time. But in the long run, I believe we were better off without him."

Her mother, Sandy, saw Nary during a visit to Wisconsin and despite the awkwardness accepts her daughter's relationship with him.

Blakeslee speaks to her father regularly on the phone and supports her sister's decision to take him in. "I know it's what she wants," she says. "And I don't think anyone should have to live the way he was living."

• • •

These days, Nary's life is comfortable and predictable.

Most mornings, he rises from bed in a room decorated with family photographs, greets the family cat, Pixie, and heads downstairs for coffee. During the school year, he sits at the kitchen table and stares out the window, counting the yellow buses rolling by.

Across the street, he can see nothing but corn fields and green pastures. The closest grocery store is miles away. No restaurants are within walking distance. The silence is striking.

When the weather is cooperative, Nary spends hours by the pool, where he watches "the water go around" but never takes a swim. He searches the sky for sandhill cranes and signs of rain. He looks for deer and fox and other creatures in the woodsy fields around the house. He listens to country music on the radio. Most of all, he waits for a visit from Jalyssa Carter, Krista's 19-year-old daughter, and her 16-month-old son, Gaje, who reaches for his great-grandpa and buries his face in his scratchy beard.

"Here comes my boy," Nary says, breaking into a grin when he spots Carter's car pulling into the driveway on a recent day. "He's my buddy."

Nary's obvious affection for his great-grandson tugs at Szymborski's heart.

"Sometimes I have to stop myself from saying, 'Hey, I never got any of that,' " she says. "But at least my grandson is getting it."

The worst tension between Szymborski and her father stems from Nary's drinking. After polishing off his requisite cans of Miller Genuine Draft each day, he often hints that he could use another cold one or two, and he has exceeded his limit a few times at family functions. When the county fair came to town, Szymborski avoided it because of his obsession with the beer tent.

"I don't want to be a nagging mother figure to him," Szymborski says. "He's 68. But he has a sickness of alcohol, and I need to try and control that."

In the evenings, Nary usually eats supper by himself in his room rather than wait until Craig Szymborski returns from his job with Federal Express. But before he retires for the night, he comes downstairs and watches TV with his daughter and son-in-law.

It may not be the portrait of a flawless American family, Szymborski acknowledges. But somehow, it works.

Now, instead of posting searching messages about her father on Facebook, Szymborski proudly shares pictures of him. "I get to say good night to my dad every night," she says. "I can't imagine him not being in my life now."

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