She needed to immobilize him before he came around, if he came around. Rope, rope, rope. She was too afraid to leave the kitchen and go to the toolshed to look for rope; what if he woke up, what if she came back and he wasn’t here. She’d seen it, everyone had—the blank span of linoleum, the moment of sick realization, the grab from behind, hands around the neck, the woman lifted from the floor, gasping like a fish. Joan raised the shovel and hit him again, this time a soggy, glancing blow to the shoulder.

He stirred and collapsed deeper onto the linoleum, like he was filled with sand. It reminded her of the old Friday-night fights, dramas in which men in satin shorts alternated between pummeling each other in the stomach and hugging. Her father had been a fan, watching from a green armchair with the family’s white terrier on his lap, eating ice cream from a mixing bowl, using the toes of one foot to scratch the top of the other one. If Joan or her siblings wandered into the room and stood staring at the television, he would describe what was happening as the guy fell backward onto a milking stool or stood swaying, swollen head hanging down on his chest, or when the guy’s spaghetti arm was lifted in its heavy glove by the referee. “He clocked him,” her father would explain.

Joan had loved her father, a tender, hopeless drunk who stayed off the booze for long periods, confusing everyone and causing her mother to switch back and forth between cheerfulness and relentless bitching tirades. It was a tumultuous household, as many were in those days, but it had the white terrier and a blue parakeet, and Joan’s mother made matching flannel nightgowns not only for her daughters but also for their dolls, baked pies every Sunday morning, and put a plywood Santa in the front yard each December. Joan’s father, when he was sober, was a classic backyard putterer; he knocked together bird feeders, staked tomatoes, hung buckets neatly from spigots, and sang to the children and anyone else who would listen, songs about paper dolls and drinking. Once, he got annoyed at Joan for bugging him while he was shaving and he took the towel from around his neck, gave it a twirl, and flicked it at her. It was so out of character he might as well have donned a hockey mask and gone after her with a carving knife; she sobbed until she was ill and had to stay home from school that day, huddled on the couch in the darkened living room, watching reruns.