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“I surely am.”

“You scared Coleman the other night.”

“Oh really?”

“Him and Mama been talkin’ about it every night after they think I’m sleep. She’s wondering what he did that you could catch him on.”

“What does he say?”

“I can’t really hear what he says. He whispers mostly and she shouts. But you know what, Daddy?”

“What’s that?”

“I think you should find out what he did and turn him in.”

I looked closely at my daughter, at the dark place in the light of my life. She turned her head in a pose of absolute seriousness and came in to take one of the ash clients’ chairs.

She wanted me to know that she wasn’t kidding.

Something about the gravity of her gaze lightened my mood by half.

“I can’t do that, baby.”

“Why not? You know Mama get all mad about you and that woman, but she was seein’ Coleman when you were still married. I saw a letter from him to her that was written a year before they put you in jail.”

“She had good reason,” I said, admitting my own sins without naming them.

“But it was him who told her to leave you in jail.”

“How do you know that?”

“One time when she said that she felt sorry for the time you were in jail, he said that they had talked about that when it happened and she made the right decision to cut the cord.”

That almost got me. I might have done something if I didn’t know that Monica needed no help abandoning me.

“Are you spying on your mother, A.D.?”

“She did it to my computer. She go through my stuff all the time.”

“Well…I don’t want you to do that anymore,” I said, managing to put some weight into the words. “And I would never send a man to prison. Not unless it was my job.”

“But what if he deserves it?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Why?”

“Because I been there. I know what it’s like and I’m just not that evil.”

She sniffed and looked at me, learning as she did so what her father valued and what she might be.

“I’m goin’ to Melanie’s house tonight,” she said after a long lag in the conversation.

“Studyin’?”

“Just to get away from that house.”

“Your mother knows?”