Karen hung her head. “He didn’t never hit me. You’re the only one ever spanked me.”

“He loved you. He adored you.”

Sunset put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders. Karen let it rest there.

“He always told me good night,” Karen said. “He can’t do that no more. We can’t go fishing no more. And we always sang together. He taught me to sing. Said I was as good as Sara Carter.”

“Better.”

“You could have done something else. Didn’t have to kill him. You could have just left him.”

“I was going to, but I didn’t know how to tell you. Wish I had told you. It’s better than having to tell you what I told you last night. And I couldn’t just go and leave when it was happening, baby. Right then he wasn’t letting me go nowhere. I was afraid he got through I wouldn’t go nowhere again, ever. Look at my face, child.”

Karen turned to look. Sunset noted, painfully, that Karen resembled her father.

“My nose is broken, my lips are busted up. Lucky I got all my teeth. Can barely see out of my left eye. Think your daddy loved me, Karen?”

Karen started to cry, laid her head against her mother. Sunset held her like that for a long time.

When Karen stopped crying, Sunset said, “Your daddy wasn’t always bad to me. We had some good times. I loved him once. And I know he loved me. We met when I was sixteen and he was nineteen. That was too young. But we wanted one another and thought what we had was love, and it was, of a kind. But it was young love. We just wanted to play house, Karen. Thought being in bed together every night was love. Hear me? Keep that in mind you get all tied up with some boy and think you just can’t live without him around you and in you.”