Fat Lip

I was still wearing my white linen skirt from my father's funeral when I joined my brother and some of his 11-year-old friends for a game of two-hand touch in our Maryland yard. At 21, I was the oldest and only girl on the field. My middle-aged second cousin, hammered drunk in her grey business suit, jumped up and down like a cheerleader on the sidelines. My mom and sister sat on the front stoop, watching me with Dominic and his friends sprint up and down the field.

In the driveway, my father's cherry-red TR6 convertible marked our end zone. His funeral had ended a few hours earlier, and everyone was back at our house now, eating Italian from Santucci's and drinking beer from a keg. It was June 8, 2005. A hot, dry Wednesday afternoon. On the lawn, the boys were sweaty and excited. I was trying to keep up.

I had taken my heels off for the game and ran up and down the yard in my bare feet. A few of my cousins and aunts and uncles cheered from the sidelines. Aaron stood on the front steps, near my mom and sister. We'd been seeing each other for the last month at our college. He was meant to meet my family for the first time this weekend.

Instead, I called to tell him that my father had been electrocuted while trimming a tree under a power line.

Instead, he came for a funeral.

________

The last time I saw my father alive, he was hunched over his cluttered desk at our home in Silver Spring, Maryland, straightening it up for Aaron's visit. We'd just been to the Wheaton Library Book Sale together, where we bought used books for 50 cents to a few dollars, and he'd marveled at my choice of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook.

That night, I sat on the green loveseat in my father's woodpaneled library, trying to tell him about the guy he would soon meet. Aaron was a year older than me and was beginning his master's at

Penn State, where we both went to school. He was from Allentown, Pennsylvania, the younger of two boys. If you saw him then, you'd have thought he was a linebacker, a bruiser even. He was 6'0, 225, big in the shoulders. But when I got to know him better, I quickly realized that his outward appearance suggested an altogether different kind of guy than he really was: Aaron was smart and sensitive. He hadn't once been in a fight. And I was amazed that he was interested in me: a skinny redheaded English major with average looks who thought of herself as tough, a badass even.

I didn't know what to say to my father about Aaron though. He'd always been friendly and attentive to my girlfriends—would ask how they were doing when we were away at different colleges and enjoyed talking with them about their studies and how their families were doing. But he less cordial to the few guy friends I'd brought home to meet him. He shook their hands hard and called them "son." And these were just friends. He'd never met a guy I was dating before because there hadn't been many for him to meet. I'd gone to an all-girls Catholic school and dated, if you can call it that, two guys before college, but neither was serious. I talked to them on the phone occasionally and sometimes met them at parties. But that was it.

So when my father was about to meet Aaron, someone I thought I might actually get serious with, I felt the need to prepare him.

"I think this one might be kind of…well, 'special' I guess would be the word for it, so could you please be…nice?" I said.

"Steph," my father said, as he shelved the biography of Winston Churchill he'd bought that night. And then he hesitated, likely thinking about how to parse what...