“—Back in 1980. The Reagan years.”

“I know,” I say. Call-and-response. “And she was working the line of drunks at the soup kitchen, and you saw her from across the street.” Amen.

“No. This was the middle of winter. She was in the kitchen, stirring the soup. Her hair was loose and I asked her what if she got some in my food and she laughed and she said we’ve got bigger problems, you and me.”

This is nothing I’ve heard before. I wait for him to correct himself. The way the story goes, my dad saw some chewed-up alcoholic, whose hands were shaking so bad he could barely keep hold of his cup, hitting on my mom at the shelter, complimenting her hair. My dad saw what a saint she was and swooped to her rescue.

But he goes on with this new version. “She must have seen something in me, because she put her hand on mine and told me I was gonna be all right.”

This is backward. It was my father who, moved by a message God sent straight into his heart, crossed the street to her.

Except that all at once I know that this story is the truth. The one I heard my whole life was the inversion. He was the alcoholic. He was the one who needed saving.

“You know I never touched a drink again after she put her hand on me like that? That was God touching me, too. I felt it. It’s like her hand weighed fifty tons but didn’t weigh a feather.”

I cycle through a hundred different questions, trying to land on one that makes sense. I’m sweating and freezing all at the same time, like even my body can’t tell what’s real.

My father is the no-name, gutted drunk of his own stories.

I don’t know what it changes, exactly, and at the same time everything feels different. I feel like I did the first time I found out that every time we played ring-around-the-rosie we were calling up a plague of cholera and miming people drowning in their own blood, chanting for the smell of their ashes. I have feared my father and hated him and, only recently, begun to pity him.

But I have never, before this, felt sympathy for him.

I think he might be sleeping again. His eyes are closed, and his head nods with the rhythm of the car. But then he says, “I’m not afraid to die, you know.”

It reminds me of Kaycee.

“And don’t say I’m not dying,” he adds, before I can. “I heard what the doctor said.”

“There is no death,” I say. “Just God.” It’s a line he often fed me.

He sits there, rocking, eyes closed. Like he’s listening to music I can’t hear.

“Two Septembers ago I found a cat in the old shed. Pregnant to the point of bursting. She was in bad shape. I put a blanket on her, gave her water and some milk. The kittens came—six of them, smallest things I’d ever seen. Some of them could’ve passed for bugs, except for the fur.” He shakes his head. Still squeezing his eyes shut. “I made a little nest for them, just some cardboard and old blankets.”