Dad got to the lobby first in nothing but his boxer shorts and wool socks, his wide, hairy chest heaving up and down, one arm slung back because he knew I was there, right behind him. Where Dad went, I went, even if he told me to stay put. “Stay behind me, Claire,” he said in the same warm and gravelly tone he used to tell me to go to bed. The bear stood on his hind legs, waving his big paws in the air like a boxer. Dad mimicked his stance and straightened up to his fullest height. “Go, bear,” he said, unyielding and stern. I stiffened because if I were that bear, I’d be running out the door with my tail tucked. But the bear huffed, shooting thick white flecks from his mouth. One hit my face. He stared at Dad from his good eye—the other was just an empty socket, an old scar puckered and black—with an intensity that I remember even now. Like he knew him. But Dad stood with his hands raised above his head, and his fingertips grazed the cinder-block walls, nearly touching the ceiling of our building. He is that tall.

“Go, bear!” he roared, low and guttural. He was Paul Bunyan; he was Grizzly Adams; he was Daniel Boone. The bear growled and sniffed the air once before spinning his bulk to the ground and loping out the way he’d come in.

Behind me a handful of our neighbors stood grouped together. Hank from the market nodded. “Not even bears mess with Vance.”

Ruth pinched her lips together, crossed her arms. “But you were upstairs with us. How’d you know the bear got in?”

Dad placed his big palm on top of my head and looked down at me with a smile. “Well, Ruth, I could feel him enter the building. It made my bones vibrate.” Then he whispered to me from the side of his mouth, “And maybe I saw him from our window, but don’t tell Ruth.” He winked and I covered my mouth with one hand when I giggled.

I was only seven at the time, but I remember it like it happened yesterday. I smile to myself and stare past my faint reflection in the window to the harbor. The afternoon storm has moved over the water, turning the sky a gunmetal gray, the water choppy and black and obscuring the mountains beyond in a wall of fog. My childhood memory of Dad scaring off that bear is crisp like the vibrant red of his plaid boxer shorts and pungent like the heavy musk of the bear’s fur that tickles my nose even now.