Sublime

ascetic.

Every notch scratched in the kitchen door frame marked the growing up of someone now long dead.

My mother and I feared the worst as we waited and waited for his return. When he finally staggered in around midnight, he couldn’t walk properly, and his face was bloody and grotesquely swollen. I hadn’t ever liked my father or felt much sympathy for him, but a new feeling stirred inside me that night. “You have to be careful. All of you. Christ,

His impossible task, Felix’s trial had been to make a life in this seething home where every slice of bread was buttered with disdain.

One of my favorite stories is about an old woman and her husband—a man mean as Mondays, who scared her with the violence of his temper and the shifting nature of his whims.

Your father doesn’t live here, she’d reassured her gently. You won’t need to escape. But Avery’s father lived inside of Avery, the one home she could never leave. She had once heard a man in an AA meeting talk about how his father used to grab his neck from behind when drunk; even as an adult, he couldn’t sit in the middle of the dining room in

atavistic

belligerent,