My father, like a cat, should not be left alone indoors for eight hours. Marking his territory, he purchased and installed a medicine cabinet in our bathroom while my husband and I were at work. Perhaps if it hadn’t been hung crooked, François would not have been so upset.

During his next visit, my father secretly decided that our bathroom needed towel hooks. Using nails that were too long, my father pierced the door, creating towel hooks on one side, medieval blinding devices on the other.

My husband has since taken the situation into his own hands, hiding all our screwdrivers and hammers before my parents visit.

My father has never apologized for any of his handyman missteps, insisting instead that our lack of appreciation stems from deeper issues. “If I had charged you a thousand dollars for spackling and painting, you’d think it looked better,” he told Farshid. He regularly tells my mother that her complaints about holes left in walls and mismatched tiles only reveal her desire to impress others, a quality that she needs to change. When my husband complained that the medicine cabinet we never wanted in the first place was crooked, my father replied, “It still holds things.” His ability not to apologize for glaring mistakes would have served him well in another venue, perhaps politics; it has taught us never to complain about any problem in the house, lest my father decide to fix it. No matter how inconvenient a household malfunction might be, Kazem can always make it worse, for free.

Just as my father cannot envision actually calling a plumber for a clogged sink, he cannot understand why people eat in restaurants. For him, eating out means going to one of his sisters’ houses, where not only is the food fresh, delicious, and served by people who love him and laugh at his jokes, but there is no bill at the end.

Going to a real restaurant with my father always means the same thing:

“The chicken is twelve dollars? Does that mean we get the whole chicken? Let’s see. They have two, four, six, eight, ten . . . twenty tables here, four people per table average, each ordering the chicken dish, let’s say three seatings per evening, multiply that by eight hundred toumans . . . Geez, I should’ve opened a restaurant.”

These calculations never include the costs of running a restaurant, just the supposed profits. Needless to say, we never dare order drinks with my father, since a $2.50 glass of lemonade, which requires at maximum three lemons at ten cents each, plus a little sugar, multiplied by eight hundred toumans . . . We always drink water, tap of course, since bottled water would most certainly lead to a whole other lecture beginning with how he grew up drinking the water in Ahwaz and is none the worse for it and you can multiply that by eight hundred.