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I was young enough when my father died that I remember him more as series of haphazard, blown-out snapshots — as if there’d been a monkey with a Polaroid camera running around the house back then, snapping photos from behind the couch or under the table, or else unbearably up close, while perched on his subject’s chest or shoulders, maybe — and those became my memories. Stubbled face, rosy with broken blood vessels, argyle socks, shoes like boats. Hairy chest in summer, white then pink then, finally, a peeling, late-August red. Flat and bald on top, like a landing pad for a mini-helicopter to alight on. And then there were the noises he brought into the room, minor masculine earthquakes marking emotional atmo­spheric shifts — his noises were always bigger than anyone else’s, demanding more attention. The clichéd Daddy-laugh — that is, the booming laugh, the vibrations of which you could feel in your tiny chest, as if your body were being invaded by it. And anger too, sometimes, the resonant shouts, coming usually from the kitchen, from the bedroom — almost never occurring in the same room as my sister and I, but somewhere just off to the side. My mother never yelled in response, because yelling was vulgar. She was a snapper, though, and occasionally a hisser. She would snap at him to keep it down. She would not, she often told me, be drawn by my father’s outbursts. As far as she was concerned, he was like a toddler throwing a fit on these occasions, and she treated him that way — maybe infuriating him all the more, or maybe giving him what he wanted — until he’d hollered himself out.

But, she said, he would be sweet afterwards, also like a toddler. He’d be worn out and a little abashed and always wanted to do something to make it up. Often he’d dash from the house down to the store to pick us up “treats” — a rainbow pack of Freezies for me and Kelli, maybe an Arctic Bar for Irene. Or sometimes he’d load us in the car to go with him and make an excursion of it. I have a sense of my father’s desperation in those days, I associate it with a smell — the blue splash of Aqua Velva he’d pat on his cheeks before leaving the house. To me it was the smell of urgency — the urgency with which he called us to the car, and the forced ceremony of it, like he was performing an impulsive ritual, a warding-off of something, similar to how my mother crossed herself every time she passed a church or graveyard. He’d herd us into the small, sacred space of the family hatchback — mother and father in front, the two little girls safely belted into the back — give us a shared destination involving the joyful consumption of sugary treats, have us sing songs, exchange knock-knock jokes, forget the world outside awhile. Forget, even, the house, the family home — leave the place behind where we’d been off in separate rooms, listening to his shouts muffled by the walls between us. Just be in the car, be the family unit, on the move and inescapably together.