I keep walking, and a picture flashes to the front of my mind of me swinging from a low branch. I was about two or three and Daddy yelled at me to get down.

“You’re the only person I’ve ever brought here,” he says, still walking behind me.

Then I see it. A tombstone right under the low branch engraved with Camille Alexander. His mother’s name. But she’s alone. She’s supposed to be buried beside her husband.

Daddy kneels down in front of the tombstone. Below her name, it reads, You will always be the girl of my heart, Love Randy.

But that makes no sense. His parents both died in the same car accident.

I take off my shades so I can see better. The sky is as gray as these tombstones anyway.

When I look back down, Daddy’s whole back is trembling, his shoulders shaking. I’ve never seen him cry. Sad, yes, all the time. But never crying. And all of a sudden it feels like my heart is opening on all sides, like I’m coming apart. Everything inside me wants to see what’s hurting him. What’s been hurting him my whole life.

I kneel down with him and put a hand on his back, and he lets more of it out, heaving and weeping. “My father lives twenty minutes outside of Austin in a town called Georgetown,” he says, and briefly turns to me, his face redder than his freckles.

“What? I thought—”

“He wasn’t in the car that night. He was with me,” he says, still breathing like he just finished running a race.

I’m so confused that I don’t know what to say. But I want to hear more. I need to hear more. So I sit down on the ground and grab his arm, encouraging him to do the same. It takes him a second to get his long legs crossed, but he does. And now we’re sitting cross-legged in the grass facing each other.

“Him and Mommy were never married. He didn’t even live with us,” he says, his voice calming down. “They weren’t even together that long. He couldn’t deal with the disapproval of his family and friends. Couldn’t deal with people staring at him walking down the street with a black woman.”

What? I knew his dad was white, but I had no idea that his mom being black was a problem. I’d always imagined them living together in their own happy bubble.