My father was a ghost in my childhood. He wasn’t dead, but he was stuck in limbo with unfinished business. For a while, we lived in the same house. But I knew I had a father because I saw a man asleep in his bed during the day. I knew I had a father because my mother warned us, “Don’t you dare wake him up.” He was a beat cop just like his father. Joined about 6 months before I was born. Worked nights for the local police department. To me, he existed mostly as a snoring body while the rest of us were awake.

There was other evidence, too. Wedding pictures, already faded, my mom standing next to a younger version of the asleep man. He had the same mustache. The same neatly parted hair he still has most of today. There were uniforms and police things. I found some mace in the bottom drawer of his tall dresser. Accidentally pushed the top down too much. That stung like hell.

At night, I’d hear him showering as he got ready for work. I can still smell the Jovan Musk cologne and the leather of his police belt. I can still hear that belt squeak, heavy with whatever a cop carried around his waist in 1980. I remember his mustache on my face when he kissed me goodbye. A prickly kiss on my soft kid head. Then he went to work.

He’d come home in the mornings. I’d be at school.

Sometimes on weekends, he was home. Mostly he wasn’t. He moonlighted as a security guard at Elyria Memorial Hospital, at Camelot Music in the mall. I don’t know how often, but to my kid sense of time it felt like a lot. I don’t remember enough to construct a real schedule. Mostly, I have crepe-paper impressions of a man coming and going, sleeping and working, yelling at my mother, occupying the same house but barely touching my childhood.

Mostly, I have crepe-paper impressions of a man coming and going, sleeping and working, yelling at my mother, occupying the same house but barely touching my childhood.

There were three of us kids. Becky was the oldest, then me, then Teresa. I’m pretty sure I was an accident. I certainly felt like the unwanted boy between daddy’s little girls. I don’t remember my father taking much interest in me. In any of us. I want to be careful here, because memory is a shitty witness, especially after 45 years. I can’t know what my father felt. I don’t know what he thought, or how often he thought about his children. How often he thought about me. Did he love us deeply or at all? Maybe he didn’t know how to show it. Maybe the truth was something else entirely. All I can say is that I have no memories of him caring for me.

I do remember asking him to build a model airplane with me. It was a P-61 Black Widow. Revell? No, Monogram, I think. When he’d go to Midway Mall to get a haircut in the shop next to Aladdin’s Castle, I’d wander down to The Hobby Shop to see if it was still on the shelf. Of all the things my brain could have preserved from childhood, apparently it chose this: a P-61 Black Widow model kit, The Hobby Shop, Midway Mall. I wanted that model, but I wanted even more for my father to build it with me. I remember asking him, begging him, I think. I don’t remember how many times I asked or what he said.

We never built that model.

He did let me watch him clean his gun once. He sat at the kitchen table and took it apart. I could tell he was proud of it. WD-40 still reminds me of him. I don’t remember what kind of gun it was, a revolver? I assume it was his service weapon. I don’t remember him explaining what he was doing or teaching me anything about it. I remember being there and watching. I wore his police uniform hat and played with the neighbor kid.

Maybe that’s what I did with my father more than anything else. I was a spectator. I watched him sleep. I watched him get ready for work. I watched him clean a gun. I watched him leave.

Maybe that’s what I did with my father more than anything else. I was a spectator.

Another fragment of him is on our back porch with other cops. They were drinking. Laughing. I remember everyone wearing a uniform. And a mustache. I don’t know how old I was, who the other men were, or why I was there. I don’t even know enough about the memory to put it anywhere on a timeline. There’s a porch, some cops, Natural Light beer, and my father. That’s all I have.

Except those aren’t my strongest memories of him. My strongest memories of my father are more visceral.

I was young, probably second or third grade. Most of the details are blurred. I don’t remember what started it. I don’t remember what I did. I don’t remember what he said. But I remember the belt. His anger, being hit, trying to cover my bare legs with my Star Wars sheets, and the welts. I think he blamed me for something.

Even writing that now, I have no clue what the something was. Maybe there was no something. Maybe I’m trying, through the lens of middle age, to impose an explanation on something a seven- or eight-year-old couldn’t possibly understand. Children don’t know what’s happening inside the adults they orbit. I certainly didn’t. Whatever was going on inside my father belonged to a world I knew nothing about. All I knew was that he was very angry, the belt came off, and it hurt. I don’t remember what I did. I remember what he did.

Isn’t it strange what memory decides to keep? I can’t give you even pieces of a conversation I had with the man who was my father. How could I? I didn’t know him. I can’t tell you what we talked about at dinner. I can’t remember him helping me with homework, throwing a ball with me, reading to me, asking about my day, or sitting beside me while we glued the fuselage of that P-61 Black Widow together. Maybe some of those things happened. I don’t know. What I do remember are the welts. Reddish raised railroad tracks across the backs of both legs.

But I also remember his mustache against my face when he’d kiss me goodbye before going to be a policeman—my dad the policeman—and both memories belong to the same man. I don’t know what to do with that other than leave them together. I don’t know if the kiss meant he loved me, and I don’t know what the violence said about whatever he felt either. I’m not sure there’s an answer available to me anymore, if there ever was one.

What I have instead is evidence. There were the photographs. A man sleeping in my parents’ bedroom, who we weren’t supposed to wake up. Mom had a wooden spoon to make sure we didn’t. The shower ran at night: Jovan Musk, leather and metal, and the sound of a police belt. A gun sat on the kitchen table, and a model airplane still on the shelf. Anger and welts. A mustache pressed against my forehead before he left for work.

I knew I had a father.