I had called him that, during lunch, but I hadn’t expected it to get back to him. I was quite pleased that it had. Richard shot me a look and I lowered my head. Then he asked, “So what is it?”

•

If my mother was Hamas—unpredictable, impulsive, and frustrated at being stifled—my father was Israel. He’d refuse to meet her most basic needs until she exploded. Then he would point at her and cry, “Look at what a monster she is, what a terror!” But never once did he consider why she had resorted to such extreme tactics, or his role in the matter.

Some of my strongest memories of my father involve him weeding the garden or watching television. He did not want to be bothered, especially not by his immediate family. Activities that allowed him to completely shut out our needs and emotions seemed to resonate with him. There were moments of genuine attendance, and even concern for our betterment. He would tutor me in Arabic, he’d show up to Karim’s soccer games, he’d sing me awake. But the things that we craved most, like fatherly guidance or affection, he would not, could not, provide. He was almost robotic in his affection—an arm around the shoulders, strained and unnatural, or a pat on the back the most he could muster. Kisses or hugs were out of the question. As a child I would ask my mother what was wrong with him. “Why can’t he look me in the eye?” To which she would answer, “Because he’s afraid of women. In fact, he hates them.”

One of the few things he did actively and passionately was complain about my mother. Didn’t I remember how she slapped him in line for the ski lift in Pennsylvania? How she tried to jump out the window of our hotel room in Orlando? How she drew blood from his face and then ran naked through our neighborhood screaming?

During my sophomore year of high school, he moved out. He didn’t tell me or Karim that he was planning to, nor did our mother. One night he just didn’t come home, and we were left to make our own assumptions. He ended up renting a place, in a gerontic apartment complex with a permanent EMT squad in the parking lot. It was twenty minutes away, close enough that we had no excuse not to surrender our weekends to visit him. “I’m all alone,” he’d whine to us over the phone. “Don’t you guys want to come see me?”