Free No Daughter of the South by Cynthia Webb Page B

have a clue about Port Mullet. Daddy coached winning teams for nearly forty years. He could have pressed for promotion to athletic director, and then later to the county school administration. Momma would have liked that, him having a job that didn’t keep him out nights so much. But that wasn’t what he wanted to do. He wanted to keep right on coaching high school football. And, if you can’t tell by now, then you need to hear it flat out. My daddy did just about whatever it was he wanted to do. So I guess he and Forrest Miller did have something in common.
    Sometimes Daddy would wonder out loud how his own daughter had turned out so contrary, so set in her ways. I wondered how he could miss the fact that I had inherited his own stubbornness, his own wretched addiction to independence.
    Not that I don’t have some fond memories of Daddy from early in my childhood. It’s just that they didn’t feel like memories. They’re more like scenes from someone else’s childhood. My father had teased and flirted and fawned over his pretty peaches-and-cream baby daughter with the curly blond hair. He had shown me off to everyone who would stand for it. He had doted on me to the point of provoking my mother’s jealousy, something I had sensed, but had been too young to understand.
    I had been both proud and ashamed of his favoritism, and its shadow has remained between me and my mother ever since. Even her fretting over my developing flaws—the button nose growing big, and the eventual refusal to wear pink—had something in it of gloating. As to my relationship with Daddy, I was never sure what had come first, his failure as a father, or my own as a daughter.
    It happened just about the time Daddy and them realized just how willful I was fixing to be. There’s a type of Southern girl, the apple of her daddy’s eye, who’s indulged and petted. That type can get away with murder, and they do. But they don’t get away with flouting certain rules of Southern womanhood, and certainly not with flaunting their sexual freedom. Oh, there’s a subtext of sexuality in everything they say and do, and in all that flirting with their daddies, too. But everything about them—their clothes and hair and make-up and mannerisms—says they are buying into the rules. They know they have a privileged position, but it’s still playing by the rules that gets them their rewards.
    Sitting alone there at that table where I had eaten thousands of meals with my family, I finally saw it. Those rules were what made the flirting safe, what allowed the father and daughter to carry on that way, him showering her with gifts and attention, her giggling and batting her eyes. But if she was to throw the whole thing over, if she was the kind of girl, just to take an example, who felt herself free to screw whomever she wanted, just because she felt like it, well then nothing was safe with her. I thought about that for a while.
    I wasn’t even sure Daddy saw that what we had was a failed relationship. Maybe this was exactly what he thought a father-daughter relationship should be, if the daughter happened to be a wanton hussy.
    I was thinking about this, hunched over the table, biting my bottom lip, when I felt my skin crawl the way it does when I’m being watched. I looked up.
    Josh was standing in the doorway, staring at me without a smile. He didn’t betray any embarrassment at being caught. “Working hard on your investigation? I hope you’re getting paid time-and-a-half for overtime.”
    I didn’t answer, just stared back, hard, directly into his eyes.
    He didn’t look away and he didn’t say anything. He was letting me see that there was a whole other side to him than that good old boy act I’d seen in the other room. He wanted me to see it. It was a threat of some kind.
    I kept staring at him, and licked my lips. I ran one hand through my hair, and arched my back slightly. Acting like I thought he was there to admire me, hoping to hell I was