Dad left us once. I don’t remember when he left exactly or how long he stayed away, but I can remember him not being there. Parents don’t ask kids before they move the furniture or paper over the walls. You just walk in one day and the house you live in is different. Could it really have been as casual as that? I can’t remember. One afternoon I was watching TV after school and the phone rang. It was a collect call, but different. An automated voice said, You have a collect call from Northeastern Correctional Center. If you do not wish to accept this call, HANG UP. The force of those last two words . . . my father didn’t deserve that. The word criminal started to feel different. He came on after I accepted the charge. I wanted to say something to make it okay for him, but trying to talk was like being forced to eat glass. He sounded uneasy too, never settling on one subject for very long, not responding directly to anything that I said. Pretty quickly he asked to speak to my mother, who took the phone into another room. We never talked about it. Why didn’t anyone ever just tell me what was going on? Don’t prisoners’ families visit them, in movies and on TV? It was like they thought I wouldn’t notice he was gone. No, it was that they trusted I knew how to keep my mouth shut when it mattered.

Then there was the night of the boxing match. Dad had been back for a few days or maybe a week. The night smelled like the smoke that comes off a wooden match when you drop it in a bottle of beer. Steam, sulfur, alcohol. Everyone was excited. I don’t remember how many people were over but it felt crowded. In my memory everyone is wearing short sleeves or tank tops, and has round biceps and long forearms, but that can’t be right. The air was hot and sticky and sour. The carpet felt damp, oversoft. I wanted to go home. But I was home.

Everyone put a dollar in a soft, old baseball cap. I guess the people who chose the right boxer to win got to split the money. My dad gave me a dollar and let me put it in. We watched everything—all the prefight chat, white men in suits going on and on in shouting voices, statistics on the screen. I thought it was all so boring. I wonder why I didn’t just leave.