Written in Lit Class

My father is a mortician. I stand in the corner and watch him talk with the family of the dead. He is calm, maintaining a delicate balance between standing aloof and stooping to the emotional depths of the grieving. His head nods sympathetically as a young man tearfully tells a story about his dead brother.
My father is an angry man. He slams the door when he comes home from the bar after work. He always goes to the bar. His face is always red, turning purple when he talks to my brother and me. He talks loudly to my brother and me.
But not to my mother. My father loves my mother. He talks quietly to her, running his hand up and down her back while she bends over the stove. She tells him to get out of the kitchen, to take his feet off the table, and to wash his hands. But my mother loves my father.
My father doesn't like silence. He likes to play the accordian and to make people laugh. Every Sunday night, wehn there is no work and the bar is closed, he fills the house with his friends, and they laugh and sing and eat my mother's strawberry pie till the early morning. My brother and I like to sit at the top of the stairs and listen, till my mother catchs us and sweeps us up to bed.
My father is not a handsome man. His red face is framed by thinning black hair on his crown and his chin. His eyes are small and squirmy, so light that their blue is almost white. He has a large belly, which shakes with both laughter and rage. His hands are smooth and soft, like the dough my mother kneeds on Friday mornings. My uncles laugh at him when they visit from their farms in the east; they with their hands of rock, with black stains permenantly splotching their brown leather.