I was afraid of this tiny woman, this little doll who gave birth to me and has been shrinking ever since. The one I never feared was my dad. Papa was our patriarch, yes, and we had been conditioned to view him as the head of our four-person family, but to fear him was to be afraid of shadowboxing. He was all bark, even if he was bark most of the time. Even now, my mom sometimes calls me to make me listen to her yell at him. “This isn’t for you,” she said on the phone to me, taking a brief pause from screaming at my father, “but you need to listen to me tell him he’s being stupid.”
