Excerpt from Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It was pouring rain. My mother and Candido went shopping for toddler furniture. When Candido opened the trunk to put the furniture inside, it filled with water. Their boxes soaked in puddles. Maria was angry that their shopping was ruined and wouldn't calm down at home.

"I want you out of this house!" she screamed.

This time Candido said, "If you want me out, I will go, but I will not come back. Is that what you want?"

"Yes! You're a good-for-nothing wetback! I want you out for good!"

He packed quickly while Maria complained to my grandmother, "What kind of man leaves his wife and son?" My mother went to the kitchen and found a knife. Then she blocked the front door.

"You aren't going anywhere," my mother said. "If you leave, I'll call la migra on you!" Then she came at Candido with the knife.

My grandmother stood in front of him and faced my mother. "If you want to hurt this good man who goes to work every day and tries to make you happy, you'll have to get through me. You'll have to kill me first."

"You've always been on his side!" my mother screamed. She put the knife on a table and then grabbed me. She picked me up and shook me, hard.

"Don't do that to Brando!" Candido said "You're going to hurt him!"

My mother said, "I'll kill Brando if I want to! He's my child!" Then she threw me onto the couch and reached for the knife again.

"Go! Go!" my grandmother told Candido.

My father ran out of the house to a friend's apartment, stayed there for a few months, and then found a place of his own in East Los Angeles. That's where he'd forget who he and his family were and start his life again.

• • •

A parent who disappears, if he's spoken of at all, is at the mercy of the one who stays behind and of a child's wishy-washy memory. Birthday parties, trips to the park, walks to the grocery store, hugs, kisses—nothing with Candido in it stuck.

My father's forgetting was more specific, more deliberate. Candido hadn't been married to my mother long enough to earn a green card. He was terrified of the power she had to potentially destroy his life. His fear was so great it made a Mexican illegal risk deportation and convinced a proud man to abandon his only son.

My mother wanted to forget Candido. There was a massive photo purge, but she kept a handful of documents and pictures she could have easily thrown away. She doctored the backs of these surviving pictures poorly with false captions, such as "My friend Candy" or "Uncle Candy," and then waited for the day when her lies wouldn't satisfy my questions anymore. I was twelve or thirteen when she told me at last who he was—who I was—and concocted fantastical stories of his disappearance and whereabouts aimed at definitively killing him off. He'd returned to Mexico, joined the Mexican Mafia, or had permanent amnesia triggered by a brick my mother landed on his head during his "getaway."

My imagination tried making him a flesh-and-blood person with a feel, a scent, a voice, a laugh. (In my imagination, my father's laugh is generous and honeyed.) That man never rose from my animating table. Candido dissolved into blank, empty space, like a desert sky drained of its intense blues and pinks, or an ocean horizon stripped of water. My father was like God: an unseen life-giving entity whose existence I had to accept on faith.

My mother wasn't interested in believing in things you couldn't see, but that didn't mean she wasn't eager to see if others would believe in what they couldn't see. A manufactured identity is nothing new in Los Angeles. For every starlet who changes her name or her breast size, there are a hundred undocumented workers who assimilate their way into the city, unnoticed, to construct their own versions of the American Dream. In my mother's dream, she saw no reason that just because we were born Mexican we'd need to live as Mexicans.

Excerpted from Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse. Copyright © 2014 by Brando Skyhorse. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.