She stepped away from the bed and went before the small single-pane window of old bubbled glass. He could just see the side of her face. She reached up and ran a finger slow in the dust on the glass. Without turning her head she said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. People just make me so damn sad. I can’t stand it. You know, when I was a little baby my daddy used to carry me around with him all the time. I remember it, hugged up against his side. Took me with him everywhere. I went out in the fields, went to town, to the gin, the tobacco warehouse. The livestock sales. And he’d introduce me to everybody—I remember that, shaking big old grown men’s hands. I can’t tell you what that was like, the world of men. All in their overhauls and suitcoats and their big boots and the heavy stained cattle prods they carried, the smell of their sweat and tobacco and the earth on them. Bending down to shake my hand solemn as if I was one of them. Doing that even as they smiled at me in the way they would not smile at one another and those smiles telling me I was someway special. But still let in! Still in with them. Even after I started school I’d come home afternoons and run out to find Daddy and like as not he’d be watching for me, see me coming. Stop what he was doing to hoist me up or squat down talking to me, asking me about my day and then telling me about his, what he was doing. What we were doing. That’s what it felt like. That it was all something we were doing, the two of us. Like my absence was just something temporary. As if he was holding some place for me. I’m the youngest you know. Two brothers and a sister all older and those brothers worked alongside Daddy ever since I can remember but it never seemed the same with them as it was with me. He drove them hard. Still does. They hate him and he hates them but they all love each other and they don’t ever say a word about it. What they talk about is what work they need to be doing. But now he can barely bring himself to look at me, much less speak to me.” She turned from the window and looked at Foster. “But nothing changed with me. I’m no different than I ever was. So, what happened? I tell you what. I don’t know. What’s wrong with me? I don’t know.” She walked halfway back to where he sat on the bed and stopped again, her hands out before her as if grabbing something from the air, her face turned full upon him, working upon itself and before he could speak she said, “Do you think I’m a slut, Foster? Was last night just some slut to you? You tell me the truth, Foster. I’m counting on you for the truth.”