My father had baby hands. The kind that worked all day gathering sweat and calluses then came home to dive down on a tight-lipped woman. He left his prey light headed and dazed, then topped the episode off by throwing his head back and downing a Dos Equis mix, neck skin jiggling like a rooster’s wattle. I watched him mix cocktails before bed, after fights, and after he got home. He’d dump Dos Equis into a beer glass with a teaspoon of red wine, a pinch of salt, and a squirt of lemon. He poured a hint of it into a tea cup once, and made me promise not to tell anyone as I took it from him.

If you tell your mother, I’ll whack you a knuckle one. His favorite threat, but baseless. He only hit me once, when I was nineteen and coming home from a friend's dorm.

"Where you been?"

"I was studying."

My father took one whiff of my breath and sent five shots rolling over my lips with a sock in the stomach. I tried not to remember his disciplinary techniques after his suicide. Instead, I remember it like a summary I wrote during high school on a news article: factual, but distanced.

The police woman delivered the information at my door. As a teenager, I used to worry that he would die from overdose of aspirin, or that I’d wake up to see him hanging from the hall lamp. Any groans, even the euphoric ones, kept me up for an hour, and the repetitive creaks I heard through the thin walls made me nervous, but now, knowing that he died instantly, his death gave me comfort. At least I didn’t witness him walking into traffic, or watch the police root through the shopping cart he lived out of.

I wanted to choose a memory of him that involved his sanity, even if it didn’t include dignity.