When my sister was born. I was seven. That swollen creature, face plum and puffy. I’ve never seen my father’s eyes shiver quite like that, not even when Mom left, ten years later. After their divorce, I started drinking daily.

When I got into a fistfight in 3rd grade. I stood up to my bully, and the principal called my dad, told him to pick me up immediately. We sat in my dad’s pickup truck, and he talked about his childhood, growing up poor in Pittsburgh, how boys in his neighborhood cornered him, pinned him down. How one boy with brown, crooked teeth stomped on his arm until it snapped. The next time he saw his bully, my dad came up behind him and clubbed him in the head with the blunt edge of his cast. He always taught me to stand up for myself, to hit bullies back. My dad wiped his tears on his sleeve, drove home. We never spoke about bullying again.

When the Steelers won the Super Bowl in 2005.

When I got my second DUI. He picked me up from the police station and roared, You’re 22, too old for this bullshit, and Men should know how to act. At home, I told him mom was right to divorce him. He lunged at me, as if to grab my throat, but stopped himself. His eyes narrowed, giving way to milky tears, a shaking, vocal sob. We stood there, my father wailing like an injured animal, like the deer he hit with his truck when I was ten. He grabbed a shotgun out of the back and put the deer out of its misery. He said, This is what a man does.

During the amends I made to him when I was 26 and two years sober. I said sorry for the horrible things I screamed at him and sorry for the money I stole and sorry for betraying every principle he taught me, and I thanked him for being present in my life and he grinned so brightly that I remembered he was once a boy learning to play football with his near-absent father after his mom left. His eyes looked like they were made of cracked porcelain, carefully glued back in place.