The waitress brings us a basket of bread and butter, which my father doesn’t touch; he’s saving room for crab. My brother and I go after the bread, spreading butter generously on both sides.

My father has given up asking me if I want a beer or a cocktail. Somehow the conversation shifts and he asks me instead when I had my first drink. My father’s jaw drops when I tell him I was eighteen. I can tell he is surprised I didn’t wait until I was twenty-one.

Eighteen is a lie.

I was seventeen, a few months before my birthday, at my boyfriend’s house. His parents sat at the dinner table drinking a couple bottles of Blue Moon.

Despite practically growing up in a bar, I knew little about alcohol. I didn’t realize that beer had different flavors. Up until then all I had known about the taste of beer was the Coors on my grandmother’s lips when I kissed her goodbye. I was intrigued by the orange taste boyfriend’s parents described. His mother offered me a sip.

Up until then, alcohol had not been on my radar of adolescent curiosities and, in fact, was something I stayed away from. This was probably due to a lot of things. My mother was a school nurse, and my health teacher in school beat us over the head with facts to scare us, like telling us that alcohol kills brain cells. I was nervous for my still-developing brain—I figured I needed all the neurons I could get, which made me hesitant to even try it. Did one sip equal five brain cells? Ten? I couldn’t take the chance. My overactive conscience kept me from doing a lot of things that are probably considered a normal part of the teenage experience: trying cigarettes, smoking pot, staying out after dark. Alcohol was just another one of those things I didn’t want to mess with, even though plenty of kids I knew had tried it.

But the whole informality of trying a beer, at home, in front of adults, put me at ease. My parents never offered anything like that before, although maybe they would have obliged if I had asked. Alcohol was rarely talked about in my house. My father moved out shortly after I finished the fifth grade, and my parents would continue to battle behind closed doors for years over his addiction. Alcohol created such a wedge in my family that I knew I wanted nothing to do with it.

But when my boyfriend’s mother handed her bottle to me, I took a sip. I was tired of being so afraid of something that I knew so little about.

I didn’t feel any different. My brain still felt like it had all its neurons intact. I probably only remember this moment because I had built it up in my head for so long. I didn’t enjoy the taste; I didn’t like the bitterness, didn’t like the way that it burned going down my throat. It would be months before I had alcohol again.

I don’t tell my father this story. He is too surprised by my admission that I had my first drink at eighteen.. His reaction is so exaggerated I think he’s being sarcastic. Then I realize he is genuinely disappointed.

“I just can’t believe it,” he says, looking at me with a glimmer of sadness in his eyes, “I told all of my friends, nah, she’s a good girl, she waited until she was twenty-one.”

“I only tried it,” I say, trying to cover my tracks, still stung by those words, good girl.

Only trying it is also a lie.

I don’t tell him about the New Year’s Eve during my freshman year of college when I got absolutely trashed in my own apartment. It was my first time drinking since I tried that beer, and I was testing my new independence away from home. I spent the evening getting loaded on vodka cranberries. I was drunker than I realized, and when I took a shot of whiskey with everyone else at midnight, I had to run straight to the bathroom to throw up.

I also don’t tell him about the time I sneaked into a bar three months before I turned twenty-one. My roommate at the time let me use her military ID, and despite the fact that we walked up to the bouncer at the same time, he barely looked at the picture before waving us through. I nervously sipped a Dirty Shirley over a span of two hours, worried I’d be caught.

I can probably count the number of times I’ve been drunk on one hand. My father didn’t see those Friday and Saturday nights when I stayed home poring over textbooks instead of going out to party. He didn’t see when I’d pick up extra shifts at work so I could save for the next semester. But none of that matters now because I’ve ruined his image of me as a good girl.

 

My father shakes his head at me from across the table. He can’t let it go.

There’s no right way to recover from his shock so I stay silent, taking another bite of bread.

“Don’t fill up on that bread,” he says, and I slump in my chair even further.

I know less about my father’s own history with alcohol than he does about mine; even though alcohol is the family business, nobody ever talks about it. I imagine my father in high school, sneaking out of the house with his brother to go ride dirt bikes with their friends in the desert lands of Tucson—lands now paved over with parking lots and strip malls. I imagine my father taking a swig of tequila as a bottle gets passed around while they all sit near a bonfire. Maybe it all started out as good, innocent fun at first, but with every sip, my father began unraveling something in his brain he will never be able to quite fasten back together.

I don’t know much about my father as a drinking man. I know him as a drunk, but there’s a difference. He never openly drank in front of me, at least not as a child. I only ever saw the after-effects, namely the flammable moods, the result of downing a couple of beers before picking me up from school. I don’t know if he was ashamed or if he thought he was just skilled at hiding the signs.

My father takes another sip of his beer at the table, and I realize this is one of the few times I’ve ever seen him with a drink in his hand.

Perhaps this is what made my childhood so confusing; whenever my mother got angry with my father for drinking, I wouldn’t understand because I never saw it myself.

Once when I was eight or nine, I had fallen asleep in my parents’ bedroom, the way I did almost every night. My father came home late from work, the way he did almost every night. On this particular night, it was one time too many. I woke up to my mother’s side of the bed empty; instead, she was out in the hallway screaming at my father.

“Look, you are making your daughter cry,” my mother said.

My father began to cry too.

I didn’t understand what he had done wrong. Why couldn’t she just leave him alone? Why did she have to yell at him all the time?

“Promise her you’ll never drink again,” my mother demanded.

“I promise I’ll stop,” he sobbed.

But I still didn’t know why my mother was picking a fight. I knew my father worked late, but I didn’t know any different, didn’t know the things that were happening that I could not see.

It took me years to understand the full extent of my father’s drinking problem. My mother had to teach me how to spot the signs in case my father picked me up from school and he was drunk: the way his lazy eye would shift sluggishly, the way his words would start to run together, the way he would get upset at the drop of a hat.

Even now, as an adult, I still question my father’s sobriety every time he calls me. I can’t help but wonder if he’s had a beer or two or if he’s really just an angry person, a person who once tailgated a woman who cut him off, following her right up to her own driveway. I sat in the front passenger seat, trying to crouch down so that she wouldn’t see me, wouldn’t be able to look me in the eyes as my father backed out onto the street again, slowly, giving her a dirty, menacing look.