Like him I am shy and halting in conversation, and usually prefer quiet. At least watching football, I knew when to cheer, and when to groan theatrically with disappointment, and I knew that my father and I were reacting in the same way at the same time. Our relationship has been marked by blowups and tentative rapprochement for nearly as long as I can recall, and it is not one that has changed much over the years. With adulthood, awkwardness has settled between us instead of comfort: a fear of the wrong move, a sense that a false step will shatter the peace.

When my father and his second wife were divorcing, I was determined to keep myself neutral. This was the third divorce for me as a daughter — my parents, my mother’s second husband, my father’s second wife — and I could not, I decided, keep my own sanity while engaging with the divorce in any way. The equanimity that came from this neutrality lasted precisely until the moment my father, his voice on the phone quiet with anger, said to me, “Do you know that your stepmother has put you down as a witness to testify at trial?”

I saw this as a sign that keeping out of it would be harder than I’d thought.

My father sent me emails and text messages about the divorce. They got angrier: at my stepmother, at the courts, at the world he lived in where his youngest daughter, my sister, could be in someone else’s home, out of his reach. He, like me, masks sadness in rage.

Then I got caught in it. If I wasn’t with him, I was against him. His notes started saying things like, “I have tried.” They said “why don’t you” and “you should” and “please.” They were signed, “your father.” I cried until blood vessels burst under my skin.

I didn’t let my father hear me cry. I didn’t answer his notes, either. Instead I shredded my fingernails and broke out in cystic acne that made moving my face painful. Finally I said to him on the phone, “We aren’t having this conversation.” I started screaming: “I’ve told you I won’t have this conversation with you.”

“I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong,” he said. I went into hysterics and hung up. For the next few weeks I ignored his calls, picked at my skin, and watched a lot of football.

Then my grandmother called me from Houston, where my family lives. I had decided not to visit until my father was over the divorce, or at least over talking about it with me. “We’re having a Christmas party,” she said. She sounded hopeful, which is not a tone my grandmother customarily uses. “I was thinking you might want to come. I’ll buy you a ticket. Also,” she added, “my mother is in the hospital.”

My great-grandmother is 99, although in her mind she’s been 90 for several years. She is fragile. The equation had changed. If this, then that.

I bought the ticket. “I’m staying with Grandma,” I said to my father in an email. He wrote back: “Stay with her Sunday night. Monday with me.” I didn’t respond. I was strung out with nerves; I packed my suitcase in a more obsessive fashion than usual, dividing my toiletries by type into Ziplocs, putting my shoes into plastic bags, rolling each item of clothing individually, down to underwear. I watched the Broncos beat Chicago and yelled at the screen: “You little prick,” I spat at Tebow. “You lucky overrated jackass.”

My father picked me up at the airport and I was strung tight. I hugged him with one arm instead of two, hanging on to my suitcase with the other. Don’t say anything, I thought at him, so hard he must have felt it. If you say a word about your divorce, I am back on that plane.

When my father and stepmother first split up, he got a new job and a small apartment. He cut his life down to its bones — cookbooks, a few fishing rods, the ties and plain white shirts he had to wear to work. He lost 40 pounds. He stopped, as far as I knew, watching football. Once he called me during a game: “Who’s playing?” he asked me, and I told him — it was the Vikings that night—and he laughed a sad sort of laugh and said, “I have to ask you who’s playing.” I watched games at night knowing that my father wasn’t watching them with me.

From the airport we went for Tex-Mex. It was beautiful out, high 60s and sunny. We went in the restaurant to order and he pointed to two spots at the bar. “Why not outside?” I asked him and he grinned a little, looking sheepish, and pointed at the television over the bar: the Houston Texans, who had just clinched their first playoff spot, were on.

“Have you been keeping up with the Texans?” he asked me, as we settled in.

I told him that the games weren’t shown in St. Louis. “We have to watch the Rams.” I ordered a margarita, and drank it too fast. My head pitched a little.

“I heard commentators talking about how that Rams-Seahawks game was the worst Monday Night Football they’d ever seen,” he said. “I didn’t watch it.”

“I went to sleep in the second quarter.”

The screen kept cutting in and out, and every time it went out, the noise in the bar rose and rolled with groans. Every time it came back, there was a cheer and a collective leaning forward.

My father asked me what the sports writers were saying about the Rams. “What are they going to do about it?” he asked, sounding exasperated. I reported what the writers were saying: For god’s sake do something about the defensive line. Poor Sam Bradford. Fire the coach.

I took bites from the food on my father’s plate when I finished my own, and ordered another margarita. Houston was losing to Carolina, bitterly; I alternately celebrated and smacked the bar with my hand in disappointment. Next to me, my father celebrated and smacked the bar at the same time.

A few weeks later, during the first half of a Saints-Falcons game, I texted my father. “Are you watching this?” I asked him. “It’s pretty good.”

“It’s VERY good,” he texted back.

I knew he was sitting in front of the game with a whiskey or one of his home-brewed IPAs. I was eating kettle corn straight out of the bag, my feet on a pillow. We were waiting for Drew Brees to break the single-season passing record, which he did, beautifully, on a touchdown pass that came after such a string of missteps that it almost seemed he’d set up the drive that way on purpose.