“Dad,” I said then. “Are you mad because of what she does with Hal in the back field?”

He turned to stone next to me, his eyes hollowed out by disappointment, but he thought I didn’t see it. “Hal Nightingale? What do they do in the field?” he asked, his voice too measured to be nonchalant.

“I probably shouldn’t say. It was … sinful.”

Dad’s head dropped into his hands. He looked completely worn out.

“I’m sorry, Dad. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Go on to bed.”

“Are you sure? I don’t mind keeping you company.”

He put a hand on my shoulder. It felt warm for a moment. Then he drew it away. “It’s okay,” he said. “Go.”

I left him and went quickly to bed. It was three o’clock in the morning when I woke up to shouting outside. At first the noise sounded like thunder, but it was the rumbling of my father’s voice.

“I know what you did! I know what you’re doing!”

My sister’s voice was whiny and plaintive. “What? Who told you that? I like him, Dad. He’s not a bad guy.”

“I heard he deals MDMA to minors. That’s chemical drugs! Are you high right now?”

“No, Dad—”

“All summer you’re telling your mother one thing and me another. We won’t be lied to again!”

There were sentences I didn’t catch then, words spoken too fast and too angrily.

“Like you’d know,” Ruth said in a storm of defiance. “You washed your hands of me a long time ago. You make snap judgments about people all the time, and then they’re dead to—”

There was a crash of glass breaking as Dad hurled something against the wooden siding.

“You’re done!” Dad bellowed. “Go to bed. You won’t be seeing him again.”

He left the porch before Ruth did: I heard his heavy tread as he came upstairs. She sat down there alone for ages, creaking back and forth in Dad’s rocking chair. When she finally came up to bed, I pretended I’d slept through the whole thing.

Dad fired Hal the next day, but Hal still lingered out by the road, waiting around for Ruth to see him. All day long, he was out there while Ruth remained grounded inside the house. He tried to get my attention a few times, talk to me, probably wanting me to send a message to Ruth. He hung around after that first day when he thought Dad wouldn’t be there. Mom was watching Ruth closely by then, a new development for which Ruth blamed me entirely.

“Thanks a lot, golden girl,” she’d say to me when Mom moved away from the kitchen table at lunchtimes. “Just wait till they find out what you’re doing.”