“He was a creep, but I don’t think anything violent happened between them back then.” He was quiet for a moment. “You wondered the same thing about your mother.”

That was true, but my father and I had never talked about it. “I don’t understand how she could forgive you. I thought she’d leave you, but she never did.”

“I don’t understand why she didn’t leave me either,” he said. “I was a mess. I didn’t deserve her.”

“Why did you hit her?” That was something I’d always wanted to understand.

“I’ve spent a long time asking myself the same thing,” he said. “When I first went to therapy, it was all about controlling anger. Count to thirty, breathe deep, focus your mind on something else, that kind of thing. But that was like a bandage over the problem. The issue wasn’t the anger. It was that I felt entitled to an outlet for my anger.”

His words resonated with me on a deep level. We’d never talked like this to each other. Maybe it helped that we could look at the road and not each other.

“How do you know you’ve changed?” I asked.

“I hope I have,” he said. “I meet with a group every week. I don’t drink anymore, or go to bars, so no more bar fights. The last few years with your mother were really good, but she was sick, so that changed our dynamic. I wonder if I ever got involved with another woman what would happen. Part of me is too afraid to find out.”

It had been almost four years since my mom had died. I hadn’t realized my father was living as solitary an existence as I was. Part of it was that I didn’t trust other people, but I didn’t trust myself either. Hookups I could handle. Relationships were terrifying.

“If someone hurts me, I want to kill them,” I admitted.

“That’s because you’re like me.” He sighed. “I used to hate my father. He was the cause of so much misery in the lives of people I loved. I dreamed of killing him.”

“He beat your mother?” I’d never heard this story before.

“He did. And me, and my brother.”

“Did you ever take him on?”

“When I was seventeen,” my father said. “I tackled him, and he beat the hell out of me. Then he threw me out of the house.”

It was twisted of me, but I laughed so hard at that tears came to my eyes. The similarities between my father and me had always been clear, even when I wanted to deny them.

“Yeah, you enjoy stories about me getting my arse kicked,” he commented.

“I didn’t mean it that way . . .”