After that welcoming dinner, however, the tension was immediate. My grandmother saw my father as a lazy, manipulative man. My father believed my grandmother meddled, and in her eyes he saw a vision of himself he couldn’t bear to witness, which is to say, she saw the parts of him he had hoped to keep hidden, and there are few things as threatening to us as individuals as a person who perceives our worst flaws, especially when those flaws are all they see. I think my father was frightfully conscious of this every step of the way, and it made him defensive, then angry, and finally, after many months, he resigned himself to the fact that he’d never convince her otherwise, at which point he simply gave up. They would never trust each other, and they rarely ever talked, but at least there was some harmony to that.

My mother was nineteen when we moved, which was the legal drinking age at the end of 1986, and my parents took advantage of this at the local bar where my mother would later work, the bar in which I was raised. Before she had her stroke, my grandmother had still earned a modest salary, still controlled the savings left behind by my grandfather, who was killed in an automobile accident in West Virginia when my mother was ten years old. His death is what prompted the move north to Ohio. My grandmother wasn’t wealthy, but coming from an apartment where the gas or electric was often turned off, where I was without a room and slept on the couch, it seemed like we were suddenly rich. My parents used her for this, neither in a rush to find a job, spending most nights at the bar a two-minute walk away while the parenting duties fell to my grandmother. And when she had her final stroke when I was six, my parents had spent nearly everything she had saved. The only way to pay for the funeral was to refinance the house that, until then, was halfway paid off.