“One day when I was fourteen, I told Charlie that I hated Mother. “Don’t hate her, Jo,” he told me. “Feel sorry for her. She’s not near as smart as you. She wasn’t born with your compass, so she wanders around, bumping into all sorts of walls. That’s sad.” I understood what he meant, and it made me see Mother differently. But wasn’t there some sort of rule that said parents had to be smarter than their kids? It didn’t seem fair.”

“I had said too much. He was giving me the look. I hated the look. It was the “You’ve had it tough, huh, kid?” look. It made me feel pathetic.”

“I didn’t agree with Cokie. It wasn’t just rich folks. Mother was soul broke, too.”

“You’ll have champagne. All girls like champagne.” All girls didn’t like champagne. I preferred root beer. Willie preferred anything that smelled like gasoline and burned her throat. She could hold her liquor better than any man, and I wished she was there to help me navigate John Lockwell.”

“It went on. Each lie I told required another to thicken the paste over the previous. It was useless, like when I learned to crochet and made a long string of loops. Being useless builds character, Miss Paulsen had said. Perhaps she was home now, drinking a weak Earl Grey from last night’s tea bag, massaging her taffied scalp.”

“That’s a good hustle,” I told him. “We both got a little hustle, don’t we?” He pulled on his jacket. “But I like to think we got more heart.”

“Willie said fathers were overrated, that my father could be one of thousands, most likely some rotten crotch creep that loved clip-on ties. She said I should forget about it. But I didn’t forget about it. I couldn’t. So the game continued, and for years I added names to the list, imagining that 50 percent of me was somehow respectable instead of rotten. And creepy was certainly relative. After all, what was creepier, a man who loved clip-on ties or a girl who kept a log of fantasy fathers hidden in her desk drawer?”