Listen to my father and you’ll think we’re right in there with the rest of them. The truth is we’re marginal, at best. My grandmother, who I never knew, was a Czech woman who married an Irish electrician named McGuire. He died of bone cancer when my father was still a boy, and a few years later she got another husband, Mario Ragazzino, who adopted my father and gave him the last name. When it came time to incorporate this ash-blond kid named Dermot into the decidedly Italian family business, his adopted father hooked him up with one of the Ragazzino car dealerships and made him a drive-away—a guy who delivers cars to out-of-state buyers. Maybe he was unhappy in Utica. Maybe he was just destined to be a fuckup. Whatever the reason, they handed him the keys to a brand-new Cadillac to deliver to a man in Washington, D.C., and my father, at the age of twenty-two, drove that Cadillac down to Washington and got it into his head to keep it. I imagine that in Ragazzino business lore, it’s referred to as the time that adopted mick stole the car and vanished for five years. In the history of my own existence, it was the time when my father went on the lam and seeded a family. He met a girl in D.C. (my mother), got married, and had two kids (me and my sister). Then he vanished again—this time from us—tucking his tail between his legs and slouching back to Utica to beg forgiveness.

They forgave him. At least, they didn’t disown him. From attending the few Ragazzino family weddings and funerals we’ve been invited to over the years, and from listening to information gargled up by drunken uncles I barely know, I’ve gathered that from that point on they gave my father nothing but crap jobs—answering phones for nonexistent companies, overseeing football party cleanups at the sports bars, and delivering not Cadillacs but fruit baskets to business associates.