He never wanted to lose. He once told us about the three boys who had jumped him, how he’d hunted each one of them down afterward and fought them fairly—one-on-one. Even in the third grade my father was tough. He put the last boy in the hospital, beating him within an inch of his life with bottles and whatever else he could find in the street. This was not out of the ordinary for the time and place he grew up in. His own father beat him for it, but not with his usual severity: he was proud of his son for fighting back. When my father told me, so was I. This is who we are, I thought. This is how we survive. I wanted my father to want to survive. I believed he still did, even if it didn’t seem like it from the outside. I took up the job of his survival with fervor. I wanted him to see how alike we were, and if I could try to survive, then he could, too.

THE FIRST NIGHT of our trip together, we rented a hotel room in a roadside efficiency hotel—not the kind you make a reservation for, but the kind you hope still has rooms by the time you’re too tired to keep driving.

In the darkness of the hotel room, my father fought a bear in his sleep and kicked over the coffee table next to the sofa he was sleeping on. I had learned to be on high alert—variations of breathing patterns, sounds of distress—from years of listening through doorways. My mother and I were sharing the bed, and we heard a loud crash. She shook my shoulder, thinking I was asleep. “I know,” I whispered. We were worried that he was dying, and that he had to go to the hospital again. She jumped out of bed and made it across the room to shake him awake even before I had a chance to move. I crawled out of bed to pour water from the bathroom sink into a glass for him. He sipped it as my mother touched his face with a kind of tenderness I had never seen from her before. It must have been the person she turned into during these late-night scenarios, during the kind of moments I had never been privy to.

He told us that in his dream he was on the street, and he heard freight trains first, then the bear. He said he fought it to protect me, and for a moment I thought I saw my mother look jealous. She had been with him every night through all of this and she wanted all of him in return.