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spectacular electrical storm. “It was beautiful,” he said quietly, gazing out at the stars.

3.
    I gave up trying to escape my family long ago. We were like a boisterous pack of lemurs, twitchy and clannish, leaping frantically out of our den, turning en masse to the left, then to the right, chattering shrilly at intruders. When I graduated from the University of Delaware, I turned around and moved right back home, ostensibly to regroup. Perhaps “graduated” is sort of a broad term, because I was seventeen credits short of a degree. I was just desperate to escape Delaware, with its sprawling campus and its thick-necked frat boys, so I promised my father that I would attend summer school and make up the classes. My dad left Michigan State early to embark on his career at Penney’s, so it broke his heart that I would continue the family legacy of being diploma-free. Of his three daughters, only Dinah has managed to graduate college, and no matter what I have achieved since I left Delaware, he periodically brings up those seventeen credits.
    â€œIt’s never too late to get an education,” he will say.
    â€œIt most certainly is,” I reply. “One of my classes is a Biology with Lab. If I go to class at this point, I’ll look like Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School. ”
    Then he inhales, and slowly blows out a breath through pursed lips, and I know that he’s about to paint a Dark Picture. “Say you apply for a job,and they do a background check,” he says. “They come to find out that you lied. You can kiss that job good-bye. What if you become famous—say you receive some award, something like that—and somebody decides to look into your past?” He shakes his head. “Kiss that award good-bye. Tell you right now.”
    â€œWho is this investigative team?” I ask him. “And why don’t they have anything better to do? And what award am I getting, exactly?” He will not be distracted.
    My father is the most genial midwestern guy imaginable, but for him, disaster lurks around every corner—financial ruin, squandered health, pyramid schemes, airbags failing to deploy—so he tends to use fear as a parenting tool to try to goad his daughters into being more prepared. This inevitably involves Kissing Things Good-bye. “Looks like mold,” he’ll say, standing up and brushing off his knees after inspecting the wood underneath Heather’s porch. “Better get that sealed up, or you can kiss this porch good-bye.”
    Most often, it is your actual life that you can kiss good-bye. “Huh,” he’ll say when you tell him that no, you don’t have a carbon monoxide detector. “Guess you didn’t hear about that family in the news, down in Trenton. Went to sleep, never woke up. Some sort of problem with the oven. Carbon monoxide detector is twenty bucks. Your call.” Then comes the Sorrowful Head Shake.
    If he comes to visit, he will bring along trinkets that are designed to induce complete paranoia: cans of Mace that attach to your keychain, a plastic hood that filters out smoke in case you need to crawl out of your apartment during a fire (“Maybe you’re not aware that most accidents occur at home”), a special doorjamb for use in a hotel room to prevent break-ins during the night, when you’re most vulnerable. “You’ve got a constantly changing population in a hotel,” he’ll say grimly, handing over the unwieldy, hard-to-pack device. “You think a security guard can keep track of everybody?”
    At the very least, he’ll show up with a sheaf of papers from the latest Consumer Reports, the bible of preparedness, which he keeps in a file cabinet, indexed back to the Reagan administration. “Think it can’t happen to you?” he’ll say, pointing with his middle finger to a Consumer Reports article on long-term disability insurance.