I understood this wasn’t about my father at all, but it was still really irritating. “Yes,” I agreed. “He and my mother gave us a nice home. But after they started using, they never thought twice about us.” There were lots of kids who’d had it worse, who hadn’t even had a trailer with a hole in the bathroom floor. Hadn’t even had siblings who were willing to watch their back. But it had been bad enough. And later, awful things had happened when my mother and Tolliver’s father had had their crappy “friends” over. I remembered one night when all of us kids had slept under the trailer, because we were so scared of what was happening inside.

I shook myself. No pity.

“How’d you know to bring up Dad, anyway?” Mark asked. He looked sullen. Mark had always been a transparent sort of guy. It was clear I wasn’t his favorite person at the moment.

“I saw a letter from him on Iona’s table. It took me a while to remember where I’d seen the handwriting. I wonder why he wrote her. Do you reckon he’s trying to get Iona to let him see the girls? Why would he be doing that?”

“Maybe he thinks he ought to see his daughters,” Mark said, and he flushed, a sure sign he was angry.

Tolliver and I looked at our brother, and neither of us said a word.

“Okay, okay,” Mark said, rubbing his face with his hands. “He doesn’t deserve to see them. I don’t know what he’s asking Iona for. When I saw him, he told me he wants to see Tolliver. He doesn’t have an address to send Tolliver a letter.”

“There’s a reason for that,” Tolliver said.

“He’d seen some website that tracks her,” Mark said, nodding toward me as if I were sitting far away. “He said you-all’s website had an email address, but he didn’t want to contact you through her website. Like he was a stranger.”

The waitress came up with our food then, and we took the little ritual of spreading napkins and using salt and pepper to regroup.

“Mark,” Tolliver said, “is there any reason you can think of that I ought to make any effort to include that man in my life? In Harper’s life?”

“He’s our dad,” Mark said doggedly. “He’s all we’ve got left.”

“No,” Tolliver said. “Harper’s sitting right here.”

“But she’s not our family.” Mark looked at me, this time a little apologetically.

“She’s my family,” Tolliver said.

Mark froze. “Are you saying I shouldn’t have left you-all in that trailer? That I should have stayed there with you? That I let you down?”

“No,” Tolliver said, astonished. We exchanged a quick flicker of a glance. “I’m saying Harper and I are together.”

“She’s your stepsister,” Mark said.