My mother was a pear—soft-natured, easily bruised—but my father was a pomegranate, a hale fellow who hail-fellowed at the Masonic Lodge, at the Grange fair, the church breakfast. A joiner, a doer, always a laugh and a spot of cheer, always a red-cheeked glow to warm the coldest December: he would remember your grandchildren’s names, rebuild your house after that devastating fire, re-negotiate lower electric rates for the whole town, so that everyone loved him, said he should run for selectman, said he’d be better than any of those clowns on the board—boot the bunch of ‘em out!—but he insisted he was just a plain small businessman, no grand ambitions for him, and everyone said, what a great guy your dad is, and everyone told my mother, what a lucky woman you are, looking or not looking at the high collars she wore year round, the puffy pink eyes she hid beneath concealer a shade too dark (rose beige when it should have been warm ivory). I watched her fingers pat, pat, pat but never pull, bubbles of swollen skin popping up no matter how she pressed them down, but people didn’t see. They saw my father’s expansiveness, the glow of his approbation that made them shine brighter in his reflected light, but they didn’t notice how tough and dry his thick skin was, how small and mean the seeds of his affection truly were, how we lived for that rare taste of sweetness but found ourselves, too often, biting down on bitter grit. When Mom was in the hospital and he had to fill out a form for school, under the space for my middle name he wrote NONE, forgetting it was Michaela, forgetting I was named for him. Eventually I would forget it too.