The hushed voice I would just barely hear through the furnace vent in my room in the days following Hadrian Johnson’s death.

EVEN NOW. SO MANY YEARS LATER. THAT STRONG WISH TO CRAWL away, die in shame.

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL IN THE EARLY 1980S MY FATHER WAS A tall solid-built man with dark spiky hair, hard-muscled arms and shoulders, a smell of tobacco on his breath, and (sometimes) a smell of beer, whiskey. His jaws were covered in coarse stubble except when he shaved, an effort made grudgingly once a week or so by one not willing to be a bearded man but thinking it effeminate to be close-shaven too. By trade he was a plumber and a pipe fitter and something of an amateur carpenter and electrician. In the army he’d been an amateur boxer, a heavyweight, and while we were growing up he had a punching bag and a heavy bag in the garage where he sparred with other men, and with my brothers as they came of age, who could never, not ever, quick on their young legs as they were, avoid their father’s lightning-quick right cross. It was the great dream of my oldest brother Jerome—“Jerr”—that he might someday knock Daddy down on his rear, not out but down; but that never happened.

And Lionel, Les, Rick. He’d made them all “spar” with him, laced big boxing gloves on their hands, gave them instructions, commanded them to Hit me! Try.

We watched. We laughed and applauded. Seeing one of our brothers trying not to cry, wiping bloody snot from his reddened nose, seeing our father release a rat-a-tat of short stinging right-hand blows against a bare, skinny, sweating-pale chest—why was that funny? Was that funny?

Try to catch me, li’l dude. C’mon!

Hey: you’re not giving up until I say so.

Girls were exempt from such humiliations. My sisters and me. But girls were exempt from instructions too. And Daddy’s special glow of approval, when at last one of our brothers managed to land a solid blow or two, or keep himself from falling hard on his ass on the cement floor of the garage.

Not bad, kid. On your way to the Golden Gloves!

Daddy’s girls had to suppose that Daddy was proud of us in other ways, it wasn’t clear how just yet.

He wanted us to be good-looking, which might mean sexy—but not too obviously. Staring at Miriam—her mouth, lipstick—not knowing what to think, how to react: Did he approve, or disapprove?