“I know that much.” A sheen was on her. “I’ve taken it apart one side to the other and back again. I’m seized up with it, can’t get out of it. I thought telling you might help, but it won’t I guess. It’s just something I’m left to live with. There isn’t ever any absolution, is there, Daddy?”

He wanted to tell her having children of her own would provide that. Instead he said, “If there is, it comes awful slow. But then, those chickens, we knew about them.”

“You did not.”

“You think Mother would’ve lost birds and not known it?”

She looked away from him now. He took pause, trying to guess what she was looking at. Her own reflection in the windowglass, the lamplight a pliant brass worn down from the rag. He said, “It was fourteen little fryers. That’s a hole even in a bunch. And there hasn’t been a child come or go out of this house odd hours we both didn’t know of it. I didn’t even trouble to look for the grave of them. But there were those feathers in the manger. Not to even talk about how the dog slunk for days, your eyes sharp onto him. Not to mention you slunk some yourself. So. You see.”

She put her chin toward her left shoulder, her eyes still off him. “It doesn’t change my not telling.”

“No.”

“It doesn’t change her dying without my telling.”

“No.”

“It doesn’t change much then.”

He paused hard. Looked at the clock. Bedtime. Bedtime for somebody. The old life. It made no difference. What’s taken for granted is not the same as what’s granted. He tried to imagine himself a year from now. Five years. He imagined himself come to terms with it all. Come to accommodations. He couldn’t do it. And knew it would happen, some way. He thought maybe he was the sort of person who held less and less of themselves, peeled away until there was nothing left. Some husk. The image of an old man out of his head railing before death. Again, he thought, self-pity. He said, “Only for you. Your mother, she knew and forgave you long since.”

“In its way, that makes it worse.”

And through all this had been the red anger lying in his belly waiting to sprout out his tongue. Which he did not know was there until it came. “Each and everyone of us is alone. In the beginning and at the end and everything else in between. Anything else is just pretend. Just a moment here; then, gone. Don’t fool yourself thinking it’s otherwise or even that it should be. Sooner you learn that, the better off you’ll be.”

She gazed at him. “You don’t believe that.” Her eyes wet shining.

He hated himself for it, scarring her with his eyes, enjoying the doing of it. “What about your mother? What thought she put into what she did? Whatever her reasoning was, it lacked all of us. It was all about her, every bit of it.”