Blythe shook her head in amusement. “Only the worst poetry and even worse pot, all you could smoke of either. Your dad wrote what I called ‘beat-up’ poetry, the kind you could only possibly come up with after you’d just suffered several hard knocks to the head.”

“Oh, I know the type.” Rose recalled some of the awful poetry joints around the city where she lived. Sometimes a freelance job would force her to suffer through it for the sake of a written review. Roses words were never kind to the poets.

“Yeah, well at least he had some clue of how bad he was. The ironic applause coming from my table might have stung a, shall we say, more precious poet, but your dad was in on the joke. He laughed when I asked if he’d just made it up on the fly; he said that kind of thing was impossible. I said it wasn’t just possible, it was the essence of beat poetry. So, he challenged me and the guy I was with to improvise something on stage.”

“The guy you were with? You mean you were dating someone else when you met Dad?”

“I’d been going steady since freshman year.”

“Who was he? You’ve never mentioned him.”

“Turned out he knew your dad from way back, from high school. They’d been pals, but hadn’t kept in touch.”

Rose sat up. “So, Dad stole you from this guy?”

“That’s the part I’m getting to.” Again, she checked over her shoulder, making sure Bellamy was still out of earshot. “Anyway, we killed it on stage, me and Hank—that was his name—Hank Bonden—with a kind of demented, pot-fueled stream-of-consciousness double-act that only made sense if everyone else was high as a kite. And they were. We titled it Pots for Rags. To this day I don’t know how we did it, but it was the best performance of the night, and it got us free drinks.

“Hank and your dad kinda picked up where they left off at first, but things quickly became tense between them, because your dad couldn’t stop himself from hitting on me. Not just flirting; he was trying to feel me up right there at the table in front of Hank. It seemed funny at the time, as most things do when you’re stoned, but later on, I realized how stupid I’d been. I didn’t hit the brakes; I didn’t tell your dad enough was enough. No, Hank had to do that. He stepped in and put a stop to it. He shoved your dad away. And when your dad swung a punch and missed, Hank threw him across the room. To cut a long story short, we all got arrested, and things were never the same between me and Hank.”