“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe he would. But he’s not in charge. I’m in charge.”

“Well, I wish he was in charge,” said Katie angrily. “I miss him.” Then, more quietly, “Do you miss him?”

There were a lot of complicated answers to that question. Louise the counselor had said, “Let Katie talk about Bobby on her terms, not yours. She’s going to need that.” Sherri crawled out of the tangled web of her own feelings and said, “Sometimes. What do you miss about him?”

Katie’s face changed again, became softer. “There was the Father-Daughter dance at the club a long time ago, remember?”

Sherri had let herself forget about that, a snippet slipping through her fingers and then gone. “I do,” she said, letting the memory resurface. She’d bought Katie a new dress, bright blue, with a dropped waist and small embroidered flowers in a row over each shoulder. Bobby had worn his best suit. Sherri had done Katie’s hair in a fancy updo with curly tendrils hanging down, and when Bobby had seen her he’d said, “Nobody told me I was lucky enough to take the princess to the ball!” Katie had been six then, with one front tooth missing and the other just starting to grow in, a little stub. Somewhere in the houseful of things they’d left behind was a picture of the two of them before the dance, standing on the porch, Katie’s smile as wide as the day was long.

Katie was now fully absorbed in the recollection. “That dance was so much fun. Daddy was a good dancer. He showed me how to do the tango. Nobody else was doing the tango, but we did. We took up the whole dance floor, and everybody was looking at us. I remember he wore his fancy cologne, and he was the handsomest dad there, and all of the other girls were jealous. Even though they didn’t say it, I could tell. And they served Shirley Temples and these little square cakes that were so small but each one was frosted like a wedding cake.” She sighed. “Are you mad at me for remembering that, now that Daddy is bad?”

“Oh, Katie-kins,” said Sherri. “Of course not. That’s the hard part, that’s the important part. People who do bad things aren’t one hundred percent bad. Hardly anybody is one hundred percent bad. But what Daddy did was so bad, he had to go to jail for it. It’s okay for you to miss him, and to love him anyway.” It took everything Sherri had to say that.