Far north Arkansas. Would he be lonely? Absolutely. Would she worry about other women, and he about other men slipping around? There had likely never been others for them. These thoughts might not have entered their minds.

But would it be permanent? It, meaning Jackson. The deep south. Mississippi, not Arkansas. No one knew.

And there was now me. Possibly I would not be the only baby. Did they think that? Did he or they wonder if I would grow up different without him there each and every day? If so, how? Would it be all right that “the father” was not a constant presence? How would he teach me things? Could a presence still be achieved? He himself had lacked a father, had grown up not being taught much. Did other boys have absent fathers? Could she compensate for him? Clearly, waiting for me to be born, they had just accepted how things would be. They loved each other and would love me. Love would be presence enough. We would be happy. And in that way—a way I think of as good, up to the very moment I write this—in that way my life began, and its lasting patterns became set.

STILL, THEY DID THEIR BEST to keep up the old ways—at least at the beginning. They took me. The three of us in the hot car—in south Louisiana. Florence, Alabama. The Mississippi Delta. Bastrop, Shreveport. El Dorado and Camden, Arkansas. He now smoked El Productos, gained more weight—two-forty—wore better hats, went inside the wholesale grocer houses to call on his accounts, leaving us outside in the front seat by the loading docks, in the heat or the cold. In New Orleans, my mother and I rode the Algiers Ferry back and forth while he worked as far as Houma and Lafayette. I crawled on the seawall at the lake, the wind whipping, the waves tufted. We went to City Park and Bayou St. John and Shell Beach, went to the zoo. We sometimes took the train—the “Miss Lou”—down from Jackson to Hammond just to meet him for a day. Once there was a car breakdown in Ville Platte, which took two weeks to fix. We waited there in a hot hotel room. Once there was a car breakdown on the high span of the river bridge at Greenville. My father was quick out into the feverish heat and damp wind, sweating in his shirtsleeves, changing the tire on the company Ford, high above the brown, sliding river, while inside my mother held me as tight as she could, as if I—the only child—might fly away.

I was not a bad baby, so it was almost thinkable to live this way—traveling with me across the south.