I stood up and walked over to the dog pens. “Show me your hands.”

“Huh?”

“Your hands,” I said.

Puzzled, he held them up. I reached across the fence, took his right hand in mine, turned it over, and traced the scar there with my finger. “How’d you get that?”

“Aw, you know how. Guy in a bar had a knife.”

“And you took it away from him.”

“I was liquored up,” he said dryly. “You telling me to go have a couple of stiff ones?”

He started to pull his hand away, but I held on to it and pointed to another ragged scar at the base of his thumb.

“You weren’t liquored up when Jap Stancil’s bulldog went after Jack.”

He did pull his hand away then.

“You’re not a coward, Andrew, so how come you’re so scared of meeting her?”

“I wouldn’t know what to say after all this time,” he said plaintively. “Besides, she’d probably just spit in my face.”

“Yes,” I conceded. “There is that possibility. So let me see if I’ve got this straight. You’re not afraid of switchblades or bulldogs, but you are afraid of a little spit, right?”

“Shit, Deb’rah.” Against his will, the barest hint of a smile crossed his lips.

“Daddy’s got soap and water,” I told him. “And if she really does want to spit in your face, well, don’t you think you owe her that much?”

His eyes were anguished. “But what’ll I say to her?”

“How about ‘I’m sorry’? How about ‘I was a stupid kid who didn’t have the brains God gave a monkey’? How about ‘I was wrong. You are my daughter and I’m glad to meet you’?”

“Yeah,” he said with a shaky smile. “I guess any of those would do.”

One nice thing about men—they don’t take forever to get dressed.

While Andrew splashed around in the bathroom, I laid out his suit, shirt, and tie, found fresh underwear, dark socks, and his dress shoes, then got out of his way. He was a little damp around the edges but ready to go exactly twelve minutes after he caved.

Even so, Duck Aldcroft’s funeral car had already arrived with Tally, Arnold, and Val, and Daddy must have been out front to welcome her. Tall and dignified, his hair bright silver in the sunlight, he was escorting her to the front row of chairs as we came down the slope. Arnold and Val both wore sports jackets, shirts, and ties as did the other owner, Ralph Ferlanski, and Dennis Koffer, the show’s patch. Tally looked beautiful in a dark green pantsuit and man-tailored white silk shirt. Some twenty-five or thirty other carnival people arrived in a collection of motley cars and trucks. All were neatly, if more casually, dressed, and they followed the Ameses awkwardly, uncertain of the protocol of a family graveyard. There was a little glitch as Duck’s people tried to get them to take seats under the canopy and they held back. They clearly thought they should be the ones standing and that our family should sit.