“Sure, sure.” He lifted out the case, keeping his back straight, bending carefully at the knees. It wasn’t exactly the best time of day for a seventy-two-year-old to be hauling cases of liquor, and I was worried he might hurt himself. I was caught between two lights in my life, each of them overly bright. My father was wearing sweatpants and the running shoes I’d given him for his birthday; he exercised, loved physical therapy, but he wasn’t exactly fit enough to carry heavy boxes.

Barbara was fervently texting, drumming away with her thumbs, and my father rushed off for the stone walkway with the first case of vodka; he was already up the porch steps, my father, like he could barely spare five minutes to help us and hadn’t seen that pizza.

Barbara slipped her phone in the pocket of her overalls and turned to open the pizza box.

“What, you want to eat now?” I said. I was standing in front of the open trunk, and I wasn’t sure if I should grab a case and follow my father or stay here and support Barbara.

“I’m hungry,” she said, chewing with her mouth open.

She was beautiful. Her short overalls that showed off her legs, her hair cropped, middle-school bully style. Standing between the flowering hedges and the varnished wooden rail, looking so sweet, and so stubborn.

My father trotted down the steps, hands empty, fingers splayed, breathing hard, ready for the next case. He shot a smile at his daughter-in-law-to-be, her elbow resting on the open car door: “Hungry, huh?” he said. “Fine, fine. Let’s get this stuff inside, though, and I’ll have a little, too.” He got hold of the second case with my help, smiling to himself, not questioning why we weren’t following him in with another case.

So he faced his second trip up the walk, slower this time, the bottles of gin clinking inside the box.

Our beach house was the most beautiful thing my family owned. Two floors stretching out, in wood and glass, with a sloping, asymmetrical roof, the steepest section over the porch. My father climbed the first step from the porch to the living room, the second, and then a stray cat scurried under his feet. He tried to escape it, gave an instinctive hop, then was juggling the weight of the case, off-balance, straining, screaming, “What the—!” Voice sharp.

Then he was lying on the porch, and he let out another scream, drawn-out, louder.

We ran to help, to see what had happened. The liquor case lay overturned on the tiles, the bottles unbroken. He was stretched out on his side, in a position I’d never seen him in before.

We yelled for my mother inside, but he said she wasn’t home, and he started to cry. “It really, really hurts.”