It was how I imagined raising a kid would be. You look at them one day and they’re different—different shape, different voice, a whole different feel about them, and somehow all that change has happened right under your nose.

When I’d showed up at his door nearly twenty years ago, he was a solid tank of a man. His arms and chest had been thickened by regular use of a punching bag that hung on the back porch. His hair was still blond, and his jaw was like a cement cradle for his smile. I knew my mother hated him. I knew he’d taken off when I was five and my sister was two, and that he sent us each a hundred-dollar bill every Christmas, which my mother promptly put in the bank, and that he called now and then, and either he fought with her or she fought with him over things that had happened a long time ago.

I’d talked about running away to Utica since I was ten years old, but that’s all it was—talk. The idea of actually doing it had been his. I was less than a year out of high school and itching to leave Florida. When I shouted at my mother one afternoon that I was heading for Mexico, she called my father right in front of me and told him this, then handed me the phone and crossed her arms. He was just a voice to me. There was that hundred-dollar bill, but I never got to spend it, and I’d only see him when he was on his way to Miami Beach for vacation once every couple of years and stopped off at Merritt Island to take me and my sister to the Piccadilly. “Let me tell you about Mexico,” he said into the phone. “It’s a shit hole. You want to get your throat cut while you’re wiping your ass with a newspaper?” He asked me this twice, he really wanted an answer, and when I told him no, he said, “I’ll send you a bus ticket. You can come up here.”

I didn’t take him up on it, at first. But then I had another fight with my mother, and I called him and asked him for the ticket. “Done,” my father said. And then he started talking like someone in a movie. Like Burgess Meredith in Rocky. He told me I could be someone, in Utica. He told me he could help me. I was a Ragazzino, and the name Ragazzino meant something in Utica. If I listened to him, if I stuck with him, I could make something out of myself that people would respect.