WE CAN BE TALKING about anything at all and my mother will suddenly interrupt with a particular story about me and my father—always the same story, told the same way:
Once, when I was a baby, she came in the room to find him holding me up to the window so I could hammer the glass. In other words, I had a hammer, was holding it with my two hands, and though I didn’t quite have the strength to smash the pane, I was getting close; it was audibly vibrating: clink, clink, clink.
“Stop,” she said to him. “What are you doing?”
“He’s hammering,” my father said.
Clink, clink, clink.
“It’s dangerous.”
“But he wants to.”
Clink, clink, clink.
With that, the story always ends. “He was an exceedingly odd man, but boy, did he love you.” And then she goes on with whatever she was saying before.