I started a new life at eighteen. I got a brand-new family—of one—to replace my sister and two half brothers and ex-stepfather, who by that time had also flown the coop. And to replace my mother. She told me in a phone call a few months later that I’d abandoned her. After all she’d done for me, she said, I’d turned around and swapped her for my father, turned her into the one I never saw and hardly spoke to. She was crying and I started crying too. But I was angry about that last fight, so I told her she was right, and hung up.

And there I was, in Utica. Eighteen years old, then nineteen, then twenty, waiting for the day I would make something of myself. For two years I was engaged to a girl whose name is no longer important, and for six months I was married to her—the only stretch of time since leaving Florida that I didn’t live with my father. When that ended, I moved back into his house. Whole years can go by where nothing at all seems to change. But things change. My father turned into a different person, physically. And I don’t know what I am, other than the bearer of a locally infamous last name.

“Lucky Ragazzino,” he says, bending forward in front of the combination TV/VCR on the cart in the dining room, one hand pressed down on the flanneled knee sticking out of his bathrobe. “Lucky Ragazzino always said it was his idea, that storage facility. Till his dying day he said it, probably his last words on his deathbed. But I’ll let you in on a little family secret, my friend. It was my idea. You know what Lucky’s real name was, don’t you?”

“Luciano,” I say.

“Luciano. That’s right. He was named after that pansy opera singer.”

Lucky Ragazzino’s birth predated Pavarotti’s, but I’ve told my father this before and it doesn’t go over well. I’m staring at The New Price Is Right with the sound off on the living room set. I’m thinking about taking a shower and getting out of the house.