For as long as I can remember, my father strangled himself. Sitting at the head of the neighborhood diner’s largest table, he’d wrap his thick, calloused fingers around his throat and squeeze until his skin turned fuchsia, then blue. He’d squeeze until his nose watered and his eyes bulged, waiting for a reaction.

It embarrassed us, even my sister, Erike, and nothing embarrassed Erike. The other customers stared from behind high-backed booths or twisted in their stiff wooden chairs. Girls we knew from church sat eating pancakes with their parents, right there next to our table, watching. Our father, strangling himself, got to even Erike.

She would lift the tall menu in front of her face, turn to me, voice low, and ask: “What’s he doing now? Is it over?” And little Lulu and I would nudge her with our elbows and peek over the tops of our own menus, worried that any moment he would fall off his chair onto the crumb-covered floor, right there, in the middle of the diner, with everyone watching, and die this time. Instead, he’d burst out laughing and slap the table, shaking our water glasses and his empty Bloody Mary. “They thought I’d really do it this time, Lydia—the gremlins actually bought it!”

When I was fourteen, my high school had a dance—a father-daughter semi-formal—one week before Halloween. Erike had moved easily into our new school, gathering friends in her orbit. For the first time in our lives, I’d pulled myself out of her gravity, tried to stand on my own, make my own friends. My new group of friends wanted to grab dinner before the event, and I convinced my father we should join them.

Erike refused—the dinner and the dance.

My father and I were the last ones to arrive at the restaurant, one of those fancy places that has napkins folded in the shape of waterfowl and food with names no one can pronounce. They’d saved us seats, a table apart, my father at one end and me at the other—“sitting head and tail,” he liked to call it. I smiled at the girls to my right and left, felt my ribs relax as they smiled in return.

And yes, that was my father, four whiskeys in, pausing until he knew he had the whole table, his hands reaching for his neck, fingers ready to squeeze. I stared at my water glass as my ears grew hot. My friend grabbed my elbow and shouted something I couldn’t hear over the sound of chairs scraping. The other fathers clapped their hands over their mouths, first in confusion, then roaring with glee as my father trembled, eyes going glassy, before releasing his fingers and gasping for air.

Even as I joined in their laughter, I was ashamed—less by the strangling than by his booming voice when the maître d’ approached our table. “It’s called entertainment. If they don’t want to be entertained, they should stay home.” One of my friends, a dark-haired beauty called Maribelle, snapped a picture of the group after we left (we’d had to leave before dessert with a warning not to return). In the photo, my father is pulling me too close, arm tight around my ribs, squeezing, as I stare into the lens, unsmiling.

I can’t remember much about the dance, but I remember the drive from the restaurant to the school, the way our car slid into the intersection instead of stopping fully at red lights, the chorus of horns when my father swerved across the lane lines. I remember looking for my new friends, the way they vanished into the crowd before I reached them. How I finally found them, standing together under the balloon arch with their fathers, taking the group photo without me. The way their eyes caught mine before they turned their backs.

Later that night, after the dance, after I’d washed the makeup from my face and changed into my pajamas, I lay back on the twin bed in the room I shared with Erike and cried. My sister held me, believing my tears were tears of shame. But they weren’t. Something was squeezing me from the inside, pressing tight against my throat, until my eyes watered.