“When people are angry,” he explained to me, “they say things they’ll come to regret.” The next evening, at our kitchen table, I asked my parents why they were so quiet. “Go back inside or they’ll take you too,” she said. “Go tell her the cops are going to come for her,” he said. Our coasters sat underneath one side of our furniture. Their coffee tables absolutely required coasters. Their family rooms looked like their living rooms-only friendlier. They lived in sparsely furnished houses with pale furniture and tall ceilings and pet gates. Whenever my friends called our house tiny, I tried to ignore them. He loved sitting on the back porch, drinking a glass of scotch, and looking out at all the flowers and shrubs. If you remember, we’d play badminton in the backyard, the three of us, behind the garage.

The yard had enough room for a nice garden, your playhouse, your swing set. The double garage gave him plenty of room to build things. “He liked that it was in a quiet neighborhood. But then you were born, and he immediately started putting away money for you. “No, but originally we’d planned to move to Arizona, or someplace warm like that, after we married. “Did it bother Dad,” I ask her, “that you’d lived here with someone else?” The house had belonged to her and her first husband, who she married at 18. He couldn’t remember our address or our phone number.” “This one morning,” she tells me on the phone, “maybe the same week he moved in, he left the house to pick up milk and came home five hours later. My dad, when he was young, drove a taxi in New York, yet when he first moved into the house where my mom has lived much of her adult life, he often would get lost in town. I noticed MASON printed on several limestone and sandstone buildings after that. A former city manager once told me that some of the streets form the Masonic symbol. When passing car accidents in town, I often looked at the license plates they almost always belonged to cars registered elsewhere. Twenty-five thousand people live there, but every summer more than three million visit for Cedar Point, the local amusement park. If you spread out a map of Sandusky, Ohio, you can see that at many intersections you can turn left or slightly left, continue straight, or turn slightly right or right. I haven’t even described the town where we lived. I need to pan out, not focus so much on his eye.

What if I write the book I want to write, the one about my love for my dad? What if I write a book that avoids even mentioning the eye? What if I write a book about the history of artificial eyes? My dad’s eye was plastic, but sometimes I call it glass.

The Glass Eye by Jeannie Vanasco