Try as I might, I don’t remember how I knew my father was running around on my mother. It seems to me it was just a fact of life. She never tried to hide it from me. As far back as I could recall, she would talk about your father’s little girlfriend, in this scornful tone of voice, or that hussy of your father’s, in the same way as you might refer to his beloved automobile or his stamp collection. Sure, I would hear her cry at night when he was away, presumably with some paramour, which was another word my mother favored. But I was just a kid, and I sometimes cried at night, so I didn’t think this was especially strange. I adored my father. I thought my father was the most wonderful man alive, handsome and brave and smart, and I knew he loved me more than anything else in the world. He would come home and lift me in the air and call me his best girl, and he would take me out for milkshakes at the drugstore, just me and him, and tell me stories about his day. Of course I loved my mother, but I worshiped Dad; I gave him all my secret loyalty. I looked at my mother and felt an awful, guilty, childlike sense of superiority, because Dad certainly wasn’t running around on me. I was the apple of his eye. Nobody more dear to him than his Janey.

Not until I was older did I realize the truth. Not until later did I understand how much grief my father’s sins caused my mother, how it felt when you were betrayed by somebody you loved that much. Because eventually my father left my mother. She came to me one day, when I was about thirteen or so, and said that Dad had left us for good this time, and soon after that Mama met my stepfather and we moved away and that was that. Mama said we were dead to Dad and he was dead to us, and I should just forget all about him and look upon my stepfather as my new father, my real father, a man I could trust.