When they said my father was living over in the crack part of town, where there were women who would trade a blow job for a beer – It didn’t even take a six-pack, just one beer, they said – I pretended like I hadn’t heard a thing. It was Miss Louise, the lady whose in-home daycare I had stayed in, who’d seen him out there. Before I heard that, I could not have fathomed the existence of such women any more than I could fathom that my town, where we did not even lock the doors, would even leave them wide open to get a nice night breeze going through the house, had a crack neighborhood at all. I’d have thought you’d need to go to Springfield to get anything stronger than pot, maybe even all the way to Franklin for crack. And I certainly didn’t know what Miss Louise was doing in a place like that, but that’s where he was said to be staying, and that’s where my mother went looking for him when a carton of Bud and her grandmother’s pearls went missing from the house. She took my step-father with her and they found him, but he was fucked-up and paranoid and wouldn’t admit to anything. They told him they weren’t going to call the cops; they just wanted to know where the necklace was. His curses came out shaky and they came home empty-handed. I found my my mother laying face down on her bed in her nightgown, crying about those lost pearls, and I put my hand on her back, but she told me to please just leave her alone.