“I know,” she said, her mouth suddenly dry. She’d been trying hard not to think about it.

“Things are going to change around here this school year.” He was breathing harder now, his face red. He looked like a man ready to stroke out. “You think you’ve been fooling your old man here, but you haven’t. I’ve gotten the calls. The letters. Your report card. I know how much school you missed last year. How many assignments you missed. You passed ninth grade by the skin of your teeth, Ollie. I even went up and had a meeting with the principal and your guidance counselor.”

“What?” she gasped.

“They understand that last year was tough for you. That there were extenuating circumstances. But things have to change, Ollie. This year they won’t be so easy on you. They know you can do better. I know you can do better.”

“Daddy, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

He shook his head slowly, like his neck was sore and his head was so, so heavy. “I don’t want apologies. I just want to see that this year it’ll be different. That you’ll go in there and bust your ass. Make up for last year. You’ll go in there and make your mama and me proud.”

He looked at her, eyes rimmed with red.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Know what else?” Daddy said now, the sledge swinging in his hand like a heavy pendulum. He wore his stained leather work gloves, so worn that his index and middle fingers poked through on the right hand. “I think you should stay the hell out of Rosy’s. I don’t want you talking to that Sylvia Carlson anymore.” He spat out the name like it left a bad taste in his mouth. “Stay clear of her. She’s half in the bag most of the time. If there was any clubbing going on, Sylvia probably put your mama up to it. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sylvia’s the one who introduced your mama to—” He stopped himself here, his face reddening under the pale layer of plaster dust.

Olive finished the sentence in her own head: Him.

Him again. The man Mama ran away with.

She almost asked the question that came into her head then, the question she’d been asking herself again and again since she’d found her mama’s necklace: What if that’s not what happened? What if Mama didn’t run off with some man she’d met in a bar?

But the answers to those questions were almost more difficult, more painful to imagine, than thinking that her mama had been unfaithful, had a boyfriend on the side whom she took off with.