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Billy, and Albert be hidden from the truth. I needed to know.
    I had also, in my opinion, earned the right to answers. I helped Aunt Matt each morning with breakfast, and got Billy, Albert, Meg, and myself ready and off to school. I was still at the top of my class despite coming home directly after school each afternoon to help Aunt Matt with dinner and daily chores. On the weekends, I made sure that all of us, especially Daddy, had fresh clothes for work and school the next week. I tended to Billy and Albert during church on Sundays, and had perfected Momma’s sit still or you won’t be able to sit at all look that she used to give all of us in the middle of Reverend Howlington’s long-winded sermons. I cleaned scraped knees, soothed upset stomachs, and drove away the boogeyman from under beds in the middle of the night. My shoulders were perpetually waterlogged from the tears of my siblings. Daddy worked, took long walks, went to Grove Hill to check on the hotel, or did whatever he did that made him disappear at odd times of the day and night. I kept this family afloat.
    I also heard the whispers of Frisco City. From the co-op to the schoolyard, I heard their whispers. Momma was always a popular topic of conversation in our little town, but since her death, she was all people could talk about. At first, the good people of Frisco City appeared concerned for Momma and for us kids, as if they shared some deep, binding friendship with her. Once Daddy left in the police car, the outpouring of sympathy and pity turned to curiosity, suspicion, and downright nasty gossip.
    According to the r unning mouths on every front porch and dusty street corner, Daddy visited with several disreputable women all over Monroe and Clarke counties, especially over in Grove Hill. They said the visits started long before Momma died. In church one Sunday, two old biddies sitting right behind me had the audacity to suggest that Daddy was carrying on with a woman right there in Frisco City! They hid their shame behind their fans when I turned to glare at them. One unbelievable yet popular story was that Daddy knew the woods near Barlow Bend so well because he had a girlfriend out that way. I couldn’t walk into Hendrix’s General Store without the place going silent. I constantly seemed to interrupt the debate of whether or not the dashing Hubbard Andrews shot the lovely, yet unconventional Addie Andrews in the woods at Barlow Bend.
    Many believed Daddy regularly went by the alias Hubert Anders when circumstance required a surname other than Andrews. This, I found most curious. At the time, Andrews was a highly-respected and revered name in Alabama, especially Clarke, Monroe, and Crenshaw counties where every third house seemed to have some relation to the Andrews name. According to Daddy, our people, the Andrews, went all the way back to the Revolutionary War. He said that our people proudly fought the British tyrants from our plantations in the Carolinas before heading south to Alabama. Why would Daddy ever use a name other than Andrews when our name should make any man proud?
    Many of the men who spat tobacco juice like grasshoppers while loitering in front of the shops in downtown Frisco City, appeared to relish the theories of Daddy’s guilt. They speculated on every detail of Momma’s death from the type of gun that was used, to the thick brush in Barlow Bend to the best squirrel hot spots and hunting techniques. They argued that Addie Andrews was too skilled to make such a fatal mistake. Several months before all of this mess, these same men would have gathered around Daddy as if he was the hunting messiah sent from God above to teach all of them how to hit the tiny head of a varmint from seventy-five yards out. Since Momma died and the police came to our house, these same ignorant men became self-proclaimed experts, overflowing with squirrel hunting wisdom.
    S ome of the inhabitants of our little town defended Daddy, saying that even the