I sat gingerly, the edge of my butt touching the bed, my whole body wound tight and poised for flight. I didn’t think he was in a hitting mood, but with Jimmy Ray you could never tell for sure. He sighed, like I was being ridiculous, but he let go of my wrist, made himself comfortable again on his stack of pillows. “Remember Libby Lang?” he asked me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Of course I do.” When I was growing up, people told the story of Libby Lang with a kind of predatory glee, the same way I suspected city kids told stories of girls snatched off the street by strangers or houses haunted by killer ghosts. A mythical legend meant to warn, but also to titillate. It didn’t matter if the story was true; what mattered was the lesson. Don’t be like Libby. Don’t let it happen to you. All of it always blowing back on Libby, everyone else involved somehow wiped crystal clean of any blame. The story was always a little different depending on who told it, but in the version I heard most often Libby was raised by her mama in a trailer not far from where I grew up. She was one of eight or ten kids—the number changed with the teller. All of them with different daddies—that part of the story never varied. But when Libby was about twelve or thirteen, she got a wild hair up her ass to find her real daddy. Maybe she was tired of whoever her mama had playing the role at the time, some loser with meaty fists or wandering hands. Or maybe she was one of those fanciful girls, the kind who entertain stories about how somewhere out there is a real family who will save them, cuddle them, and treat them like the princesses they were meant to be. A fool, in other words. The only link Libby had to her father was her paternal grandma, a woman she saw maybe once or twice a year. When Libby asked about her father, her grandma warned her off. Told her that he didn’t have no interest in knowing Libby, that he wasn’t a good man. Which, given the rumors about Libby’s granny, seems like advice Libby might’ve wanted to heed. If that woman—who bred fighting dogs and threw her own children out like leftover trash—thought someone was bad news, then he surely was. But Libby was stubborn, and she kept asking around. Sticking her nose in where it didn’t belong. This is the point in the story when everyone’s voice dropped, the words coming out more like a hiss. Eventually, she found out where her daddy was holed up deep in the holler (making moonshine or meth—again it depended on who told the story) and Libby took off to find him. Everyone knew it wouldn’t come to anything good, and they were proved right when she showed back up a month or so later, beaten half to death, missing a finger, and pregnant. The thing was, no one around here had any sympathy for Libby, who should have known better. There are consequences to digging too much, to trying to find people who don’t want to be found, to not taking no for an answer. To pushing past your limits. Libby was the poster child for I told you so. The wretched face next to the definition of she had it coming.