Vituperation

Tina scoffed. "I almost wish my father had shouted."

Instead, she recalled, he had gone into bouts of raging silence, something no one could really understand unless they'd experienced it. His face expressed the meanest of feelings, while his eyes registered nothing. Being in the presence of such a passively furious man had kept her and Emily on edge, as if a switch would flick at any moment and activate him.

And sometimes it did. His violence was never directed at them, or anyone really, but when he threw things, when he punched doors or walls or counters, he didn't pay attention. He might hurl a blender, or a pad of paper, or a knife. His choice in projectiles was as indiscriminate and random as their trajectories, which meant she and Emily never knew what might go sailing through the air, or when, or if it would accidentally hit them. Because he was careless.

So yes, sometimes Tina wished her father had been a more predictable kind of drunk, more angry than sad, more reckless than aimless, more absent than ever-present.

But it was what it was, and now it was too late.