Excerpt

Chapter 1

When I turned four, my father taught me the salt dance: he sprinkled a line of salt on the living room floor, positioned my bare feet on top of his shoes, and told me to leave everything I feared or no longer wanted behind that line. His gold-flecked eyes high above me, he walked me across that salt border into my brand-new year - he backward, I forward - my chin tilted against the buttons of his silk vest.

I would like to believe that the salt dance was a ritual he and my mother had seen on one of their journeys - in a mountain village in South America, say, or in Sicily - but my father simply made it up the day I turned four, and from then on it became a tradition in our family on birthdays as if backed by generations. Though I no longer recall what I left behind the salt line that day or chose to take with me, I can still evoke the tingling in my arms as they encircled my father's lanky waist. Below his right eyebrow curved the moon-sliver scar where a dog had bitten him when he was a boy. Rooted to his feet, I didn't slip off as we danced, careful at first - "Two steps to the right, Julia, one to the left" - then spinning through the rooms, past the radiant faces of my mother and brother.

When I was nine years old, I stopped loving my father. Of course it didn't happen all at once: it was rather a waning of trust until it became safer to believe that I ceased loving him altogether that one summer evening when he brought me chocolate with hazelnuts and lifted me from the windowsill and forced me to say I loved him.

Somewhere between those two images that continue to haunt me, things twisted, turned on themselves, and when I finally crossed th