Her father had this terrible habit of overly praising any boyfriend she was with. While, on the one hand, a girl wanted her father to like the boy she was seeing, on the other, she didn’t want him to seem as though he blatantly preferred this boy to her. Maybe that’s why, over the years, Amanda started to engage in relationships that were less and less serious. Relationships that would never again warrant taking the “man” home to meet her parents.

Amanda finally realized she had made that mistake too many times before. And the last time it happened was the final straw. Making her fully fathom the ingrained misogyny that her father—the person she had once admired most—possessed and paraded. That he had wielded against her in the most insidious ways possible throughout her life so that she only ever doubted and degraded herself. Never understanding that the “real problem,” in her dad’s eyes, was that she didn’t have a penis. So, of course, she was never going to get that far in life.

When she brought Jackson home for Thanksgiving that year, they had been together for just over twelve months. It was probably too soon, she thought. But, to her surprise, he was the one who expressed an interest in coming along as her proverbial “plus one.” A part of Amanda wanted to rebuff the idea, knowing in her gut that no good could come of it. And it wasn’t because she thought that either party (her family or Jackson) would be rude to one another. It was quite the opposite actually. She was afraid of the niceties that would be exchanged. The kind of praise and encouragement that her family—but especially her father—would shower upon Jackson, but had never once done the same to her. Not for even to honor her most objectively spectacular achievements. Like recently becoming the youngest person at her advertising agency to become a copy director. Or, more technically: Creative Director, Copy. She didn’t like how that sounded though, because it made it seem like walkie-talkie lingo. In any case, even after that rather large professional coup, her father said nothing congratulatory. Just a mere nod of the head and the requisite question about whether or not she was getting an adequate raise for the promotion.

She should have known better than to expect anything else. All her life, Robert Galante was the epitome of the strong, silent type. That is, when it came to communicating with his two children. Both girls. But Katie had the good sense to never care about parental approval, moving out as soon as she turned eighteen and eventually ending up all the way across the world in Japan—as far away from Galante neuroses as possible. The family rarely heard ever heard from her, but they knew she worked as an illustrator for some anime production company. Amanda had given up long ago on trying to communicate with or relate to Katie, who seemed determined to sever all ties with them, and her past in general.

Amanda supposed she couldn’t blame her, growing up with a father as emotionally removed as theirs. And Amanda often wondered if Robert would have been so emotionally removed had they been boys instead. He didn’t exactly keep it a secret that he always wanted sons. At least one. Indeed, that was among the few things he did talk about with Amanda—how her mother, Alison, had initially thought she was going to be a boy, so they had picked out the name Alan for her. Only resorting to a different-gendered “A” name when the revelation came shooting out of Alison’s “center hole” (though some might mistake that for the belly button).

Katie arrived two years later, and with her, a darker pall over Robert’s aura. He scarcely said anything to either of his daughters, and if he did, it was usually to tell them what they could be doing better. De facto, what they were doing at present wasn’t “good enough.” And likely never would be. It didn’t take long for Katie to go in the opposite direction of Amanda’s approach. Where the latter tried to do everything she could to please her father, Katie did everything under the rebellious sun to let Robert know that she didn’t give two shits what he thought about her.

Her first arrest was when she was fourteen. Robert insisted the police hold her overnight even though they said they could let her off with a warning when they called him on the phone to let him know she had been apprehended after shoplifting five hundred dollars’ worth of store merchandise at Sephora. Almost like she wanted to get caught. And probably did. Though she would have counted it as a win-win either way: get a bunch of free shit or piss off her dad. As Amanda tried to explain some of this background to Jackson on the journey from New York to suburban Chicago, he didn’t really grasp the weight of it. How could he? He was a son.

She also tried to brief him on the notion that the Galantes weren’t as “well-to-do” as they seemed. They were the kind of middle-class family one still associates with the early to mid-nineties version of it: (seemingly) able to easily afford a nice house with a two-car garage and plenty of room for a guest or three. Plus, a dog: Franny. A black Labrador who could sniff out a figurative and literal asshole from a mile away. That’s also why Amanda gave up on bringing boyfriends home after Jackson. Franny told her tout de suite that he was all wrong, constantly growling at him and nipping at his feet. Like most women just speaking the truth though, Franny was told to shut up and quickly sequestered in another room. Amanda felt bad, but she didn’t know yet that Jackson would be so douche-y. Still publicly thanking her father to this day whenever he made an appearance somewhere to promote or accept an award for one of his books.

It was Robert who, that very Thanksgiving, decided to get Jackson in touch with an “old buddy” of his in publishing. Not just any publishing house though: one of the Big Five. Robert rarely mentioned knowing this person to Amanda, whose lifelong dream it had been to get a book published and escape from the clutches of the ad agency world. And yet, knowing this, as he did for most of her life (for she expressed this dream to be a big-time author as early as junior high), Robert never once offered to put her in touch with this mysterious contact. Whenever she asked him why, he would answer with the question, “Don’t you want to get published on your own merit?”

It was all she could do to keep from screaming back in his face, “Fuck no—nobody wants that! They just want to get published, it doesn’t matter how!” But her sense of decorum in general (and especially toward him) prevented her. She bit her tongue, as she did so often when it came to expressing emotions in front of Robert. But that Thanksgiving, when Jackson just “happened to casually mention” that he had just finished a manuscript, and Robert instantaneously offered up his contact to him, Amanda could bite her tongue no more. Particularly not after Robert cheers’d Jackson to congratulate him on the completion of the book, not even aware that it was one of the shittiest things ever written (so of course it would be published). That was the thought Amanda had throughout forcing herself to read it…just another part of her role as the supportive girlfriend. But she fucking hated it. The plot was all over the place, the characters were two-dimensional and, perhaps worst of all, Jackson couldn’t spell his way out of a paper bag. Yet, despite knowing nothing about the book, Robert went so far as to tell Jackson, in words more kind and cheerleader-y than any Amanda had ever received, “You’re going to be very famous.”

That was it. That was the phrase that finally did her in. She got up from her chair and just screamed. She didn’t verbalize anything, simply let out a guttural banshee shriek that could probably be heard all the way back in New York. It was years and years of pent-up rage being let out in the face of her father’s blatant preference for anyone—nay, any man—that wasn’t her. Later, she found out that Jackson had been so keen to accompany her for Thanksgiving precisely because she had once referenced that her father had a friend at Random House that he was keeping from her. She brought it up as a prime example of her sore points with the man, and Jackson had used it against her in the cruelest way possible. She broke up with him as soon as they got back to the city. Not that he cared, he had gotten what he really wanted out of the relationship: a book deal.

The entire thing was rendered even ickier by the fact that part of the “agreement” made between Robert and Jackson in order for the former to talk up the latter to Chuck (that was the contact’s name) was that Jackson would need to agree to give Robert a five percent cut of his sales for each book released. Because, as she also later found out, her parents were on the verge of having to file for bankruptcy when she came home with Jackson that Thanksgiving. Robert was willing to do any smarmy thing to avoid the shame of that kind of disgrace for a middle-class person.

So, in the end, both men got what they wanted. And Amanda got about tens of thousands of dollars’ worth in more charges for therapy bills from her psychologist. Who is still trying to convince her that it’s safe to stay in a relationship long enough to warrant introducing the boyfriend in question to her parents. Amanda remains unconvinced, preferring detached sex and nights in with Franny, who she took with her to New York after storming out on that horrendous Thanksgiving. Neither girl has been back to the Chicago area since.