It took me nine years to leave my marriage, to kick and struggle my way out. Just as I moved into my new apartment, the first place I’d ever lived alone, my father remarried. A strange moment: there we were, sitting in my shabby student apartment in Des Moines, the contrast between us unspoken and plain: I’d left a woman I couldn’t save, only gradually coming to understand that it was arrogance and vanity to think I might help her. And my father, of course, had remained loyal; he’d never freed himself from his drunken wife, and it was years after her death before he married again.

We sat at the round table I’d covered with a white sheet, Larry and Edith and I, in the newly painted white dining room, and we drank the beer my father had brought. We were all guarded at first, but the beer made the conversation loosen. He seemed unsettled, annoyed by the distance between us, baffled by my divorce. He said, “Remember when your mother tried to shoot you with that gun?”

Sudden clamor in my head, sudden pulse-stop. The fact is I can’t remember, not even a fraction of the scene, a flash of detail, though I know it happened, can feel myself start to sweat the second he mentions it, feel the dizzy gravity of it, but I don’t remember it at all. I’ve locked it away in a concrete bunker, buried it down in the dark.

“I had to sell that gun after that,” he says. “I always liked that gun.”

I have wished to see this man roundly, not to turn him into a shadow or an easily explained cartoon. I would like to be above loathing my father, and I want to believe that we cannot hate what we really know. But I can’t accept this; I can’t bear the idea that he prefers his gun, that what was lost, in that moment was his beloved weapon; isn’t it time, now, for an apology, a gesture of regret, a…what? What could set this right between us?

There’s no getting around it: I hate him for this.

Twenty years after we buried my mother in that resentful, unvisited turf, my father reads a book I’ve written. It’s a memoir about grief, the bitter wake of my lover’s death, and in it I have described the urge to take my own life, in a hopeless hour when I didn’t believe I could find the strength to participate in the world again, when pleasure seemed to lead only toward endings.