Once puberty struck me, they referred to me in the third person, even when I was sitting on the porch with them. Daddy would say, “Katie did her share of work in the barn this afternoon.”

Mama would say, “So why’s that girl take to washing her hair every night if she’s goin’ to be doing that in the day?”

“Katie’s a multiplicitous girl.” And he would lean forward and nudge me with his shoe. Daddy’s formal education went as far as the fifth grade. But that didn’t stop him from looking up a new word in the Oxford English Dictionary every day and repeating its pronunciation and usage until he had it. Sometimes the usage didn’t always fit.

Days before he died, when he was still in bed resting from the first attack before the second and last, I sat at the foot of his bed sharing my iced tea with him. I was sixteen. There was a breeze that afternoon that blew Mama’s curtains away from the window, and I remember smelling manure and the eucalyptus tree out in back. My father had lost a lot of his color but none of his cheer. He’d been using his resting time to learn more words and was working on ten a day. That afternoon he used three on me from the L’s: “Katie, not only are you loquacious, but you’re a damn sight lubricous, not to mention lovesome.”

Which meant I talked too much, was a tad slippery, and inspired love in others. This I knew just from hearing the words and when I told Papa this he stopped smiling and sat up against the headboard: “Don’t marry a farmer, Kate. Go to one of the cities and get yourself an education, and find a man who loves you so much he wouldn’t think to make you a farmer’s wife.” Or something like that, and he said it with such a still face and tight voice I knew that he knew he was going to leave us soon, and I spilled my iced tea on the floor as I leaned forward to hug his bigger-than-you-would-think chest.

He was wrong about the loquacious part, though. The only one I ever talked to like that was him. After he died, so did my talking. Mama and I moved down to her mother’s place in San Antonio then. And it was there that I became more slippery and I seemed to inspire love in a host of public school boys. A lot of them were tall and blonde like the German boys up in New Braunfels. I liked them fine and admired them more for being Junior Farmers, but I couldn’t give them the time of day and still be true to that afternoon with Papa, so what was I to do except keep quiet, do the homework I loved doing, and spend nights in front of the radio with Mama and Gram, who was also widowed. Me and the widows.