He said it came to him as an epiphany. Like something that would happen to a saint, I thought, but that’s not how my father put it. He didn’t believe in saints. That was the epiphany he had, one day while sitting in church, that he didn’t believe any of it. Not the prayers or the rites or the big book or the tithing or the homilies or the Nicean Creed or the fellowship. He had been going to church for forty years, and it was just on that day it came to him. After that, he stayed in on Sundays while my mother and I went off to church. I wondered why mom hadn't stopped going, and why I still had to go. I definitely didn't believe any of. I knew a tall tale when I heard one. I wondered if it was like believing in Santa Claus. You just get to a certain age and you realize it’s not true anymore.

The first night my mother worked in the ER, the ambulance brought in a little girl who was unconscious and suffering from a bad concussion. Mom said she was maybe six or seven years old. The girl’s arm and face were broken, and she was bleeding from her vagina. People found her like that on the side of a road, where she had been dumped and left for dead. Social Services thought maybe the parents—there were scars on her where she had been burned before and places she had been cut—but it would be difficult to prove unless the girl talked, and even then. The girl made it through the night and her parents came for her the next day. Mom said the girl cried like nothing else when they took her out of the hospital. She stayed on at the hospital for ten years after that, my mother, and she saw a lot of bad shit. Probably worse than what happened to that girl, but she never talked about it. She just tucked it away into some pocket in her mind we never got to see. The only one she mentioned was the girl. I don’t think she ever got over that. It was too much for my mom to take on her first night. It took something from her.

There is one, I have seen it, of you dancing in a ballerina's uniform. The photograph is still, but you are somehow still in motion, and you are graceful and light as air.

I know that I was conceived one night on a hilltop in Cinque Terra, while my parents were camping on their honeymoon. They mercifully left out the details of the actual conception, but they told me that the next morning, my father’s hair was full of dew and the sunrise was something spectacular to behold. They took it as a sign something special had happened the night before.

Per istam sanctam unctionem et suam piissimam misericordiam adiuvet te dominus gratia spiritus sancti, ut a peccatis liberatum te salvet atque propitius alleviet.

Dad went to Catholic school for the first eighteen years of his life, and then went to a Jesuit college for the next four. Even though he didn’t believe in any of it by the time I was born, dad still said it was the best education he ever could have had. The brothers were excellent teachers, and he learned a kind of discipline that he never could have gained, had he not been so rigorously taught from a young age. Also, he learned Latin, which helped him later when he was learning Italian for his honeymoon.

Mom told the story of how she and dad met like this:

“Your dad was casting a variety show for his high school, which was the boys school a town over from mine, and he needed someone to distract the audience by screaming. That’s all he needed, just someone to run down the aisle screaming, so that the audience would turn their heads at the right moment for them to pull of some magic trick or whatever. Anyway, as it happened, he walked by me and heard me screaming, so he cast me in the show. That’s how we met.”

Why were you screaming, mom?

“Oh, I don’t know. Probably someone was tickling me. One of my friends, maybe. I can't remember.”

When she’d tell me that story, I would tell her I never knew she was into performing. She’d say, “Oh, I wasn’t. I just screamed the one time,” but that’s a lie. I’ve seen the boxes of pictures, and I know you were up on that stage more than once.

Once, when I was sixteen—funny that I remember this above so many other things—dad came home early on a day when I’d brought a girl home with me. He walked through the front door and right into the living room, where she and I were basically naked on the sofa. I wasn’t expecting him to be home. When he was employed, he was a photo stripper, making plates out of computer-generated photographs for a print shop on the south side. He worked long hours—longer even than mom—and I just wasn’t expecting him to be home. He told the girl—Amy something—to get her clothes back on, and he told me to wait where I was, but didn’t specify if I could get dressed. When Amy was gone, he walked into the kitchen, popped the cork on a bottle of wine, and spent the rest of the afternoon draining and refilling his glass.

Allegedly, the meal that Cousin Albert ate on the evening before he died, a fact that I never thought spoke well of Cousin Albert.

I only visited the ward once, which was more than I really could take. The smell was unbearable to me, it was so clean. The air was too artificial. He was laid out in bed, barely awake or able to speak. His hands were pale and the skin on them was like paper. I spent the afternoon with him, watching college football. When the college games were done, he asked me to stay with him a while and watch the high school games. I told him next time.

The best story about the skillet was its inclusion in the accidental death of my great-grandfather’s cousin Albert. One October evening, while pregnant with their third son, his wife Alana woke in the middle of the night in need of something to get her back to sleep. She was bringing a pot of milk and sherry to a slow boil in the skillet when someone grabbed her from behind. She wheeled around, grabbing as she did so the only thing she could think to defend herself with, that being the skillet, and smacked the person behind her in the skull with it. The doctors pronounced Cousin Albert dead of a concussion in St. Anne’s hospital later that evening. The impression of his head is still visible along the bottom edge of the skillet to this day.

Since the murder, it was considered taboo in the family to use it regularly in preparing meals. Stripped of common use, the skillet took on a kind of religious power. When family would come to visit, they would ask to see Lazar’s skillet and they would hold it up in the light and run their fingers along the name on the bottom and the dent and the spot of oxidation that darkened a crevice on the bottom of the pan. There was only one meal I ever saw cooked in the skillet. Beef liver, thinly sliced and sautéed rare with red kale and garlic followed by crepes suzette.

When dad died, he had left it in his will that he should be cremated, and the ashes scattered wherever was most convenient. The backyard was probably what he had in mind. Or possibly the trash can at the crematorium. Whatever we did, a funeral was out of the question. Mom couldn’t bring herself to just dispose of dad, though, so we bought him a casket and rented him a plot at the cemetery at St. Andrews, near the spot where his own dad was buried. It was a beautiful ceremony. Dad would have hated it.

There were a thousand stories surrounding this skillet. The family favorite—not mine, but the family’s—was that the skillet had cooked Marie Antoinette’s last meal, a plate of savory crepes, when she was held away from the mob at the Tuileries. I always thought that story smacked of a tall tale. How would this skillet have escaped the mob in Lazar’s possession or his son’s or grandson’s after the revolution? And anyway, who the hell was Marie Antoinette that she should eat crepes while the people around her made due off root vegetables?

A little less than a fortnight after the birth of John Baskerville, a printer famous for inventing many different typefaces. Like my father, he was an atheist.

The skillet was an ancient thing, thin looking and dented all over from years of use. If you glanced at it in a junk shop, this skillet, you’d take it for junk destined for the melting pits. But its weight in your hands had presence, the way a stone left by a glacier has presence on a landscape. The skillet was handed down from man to man on my father’s side for ten generations, and possibly more. It had been hammered out of a single chunk of copper that one of our relatives had dug from the ground and purified in his own smelting pot. The date hammered onto the underside of the pot read 12 February, 1706, and next to it, faded almost to the point of illegibility was his name, Lazar. You could just make it out by tracing your finger along the bottom. Since then, the skillet had passed from hand to hand in our family.

Pale and covered with skin like tissue paper. He said they were always cold. Everything was just so cold. I got him a glass of warm water to drink, hoping some of that warmth would spread inside of him. I don’t know if it did any good, but he fell asleep before I left, and I told the night nurse that he was complaining of the cold. There wasn’t anything else I could do.

Every day, he stayed home and watched television and did small repairs around the house. He fixed the porch, which had sagged since before we moved in; probably, it was the reason we got the house for cheap. The place was a fixer-upper, and dad spent the weeks he wasn’t employed taking care of all the minor problems he could. He also cooked dinner every night, since mom was exhausted when she came home from work. Dad was a much better cook than mom, and I remember this was the first time I ever really appreciated food. It was also the happiest I can remember seeing my dad, ever.

Mom and dad bickered for days when he bought the knives on QVC. It wasn’t so much that they were a needless purchase—although they were, since we already had a set of knives that served us just fine—but that dad had up and bought them without asking mom. He was between jobs at the time, and had been for several weeks. Mom was the sole bread winner, and she’d come home exhausted from extra shifts at the hospital. When he bought the knives, it was her money he had spent, and she let him know in no uncertain terms that he’d better damn well ask her the next time he decided to stick his fingers in her pockets. All the same, they were really good knives.