I’d rather stay as far away from Little River as humanly possible. I’d rather eat rusty nails and slurp down dirty shoelaces like noodles. But what kind of person doesn’t go see her dying father? What kind of person doesn’t even go back for that?

I’d gone to the pay phone outside the library to call Margo at two o’clock because that’s our schedule. Every Sunday. We started up again when I got to Florida. She’d update me on Ida Winton’s latest food aversion and Gary’s new twenty-five-year-old whore of a girlfriend, and I would promise her I was fine.

Mostly I talked about the tides and oranges and confirmed what The Weather Channel told her about Florida that day. I never said anything about the baby. I didn’t know how. I didn’t want her to tell me to come home.

Today when I called, the phone didn’t even ring. Margo grabbed the receiver on the first microscopic blip of sound.

“Hey, honey,” she said softly.

“Hey, Margs, what’s up?”

She took a breath I could hear.

“What is it?”

“Sweetie, your dad’s dying,” she said, and burst into tears.

I’d never heard her cry before. I didn’t know what to say. It was too much at once to even feel anything.

“Lung cancer. It’s bad. I don’t think he has much longer.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. “Last Sunday? The week before that?”

“Girlie, your dad is the only one who knew. Not even Irene.” She let out a big sob. “He didn’t want treatment. Said he didn’t want to lose his hair. Likes smoking better than he likes living.”

“How long?” I touched my fingers to each of the phone buttons without pressing them in.

“Maybe a week, maybe a few days.”

“How did Irene not know? How did she let it get so bad?” I spelled out my name with the phone buttons—two-seven-seven-four-five.

“You know how he gets in his own way. Him and Irene haven’t been getting along for a while. He’s been living in the motorhome for the past few months. Hiding from her. She’s with him now. That woman is some kind of saint, I tell you. It’s not her fault she didn’t know.”

“I got to go,” I said, because I wasn’t in the mood to hear Margo talking about Irene like a goddess. “Ollie needs me to help prep for dinner shift, you know?”

“Look, girlie. I’m not saying you’ve got to be here. Lord knows you got to have buckets and buckets of feelings about this. I’m just saying that if you want to be here, or you think someday maybe it’ll be hard that you weren’t here, then you should come.”