But we didn’t guess about Bill anymore, especially in front of our mother. She seemed too tired for it. I said Bill’s name as little as possible, even to the others, because thinking about it or even acknowledging it made me feel like I was betraying my dad. He knew Beatrice wasn’t his daughter, couldn’t be his daughter, but he had never ever behaved as if she was anything but his. I knew he never suspected that we knew. Saying it out loud now, when he was gone, was like treachery.

“I have five sprogs,” he would say. “Four strong women and a little man.” We would all straighten up a little under his proud assertion, be it to a waitress at the diner, a customer whose lawn he cut, or a guy drinking beer at one of the Irish bars he took us to.

Marie and Thomas said that things had been bad between Mom and Dad long before Bill existed, that they had been separated, that I was wrong to confuse what happened to Dad with Bill. Dad had kept some of his machines in our garage and collected us some mornings to take us to school, but he didn’t sleep at our house. Sometimes he washed up in the laundry room downstairs next to the garage, especially when Mom wasn’t home. He kept cakes of soap wrapped in paper towels behind the seat of the pickup. He always used Coast, a bright-blue bar of soap that smelled like him. We had a scentless Dove soap. Some evenings when I came in from being outside somewhere on the mountain, I could smell his soap in the laundry room.

He moved around back then, and I don’t know if he always had a regular apartment or place to go back to. He bought a camper top for the pickup, and the foam mattress would still be rolled out in the mornings when we crawled in the truck to go to school. He said he’d bought the top to stop us from getting soaked and wind-lashed in the open back. Now, I wasn’t sure. I found it too hard to even say it, to ask Marie or Thomas, “Do you think he sometimes slept in his truck?”

My mother kept Beatrice close to her and somehow separate from us. Beatrice had never come when Dad took us in the back of the pickup to Burger King for giant milkshakes or to the diner where we all drank coffee and got free refills. Beatrice had been too young to go working with him. The time we’d gone to New York to stay with him when he’d tried to start a new life there, Beatrice had been invited too, but we knew my mother would never have let her go.