Soaring elms cluttered with leaves, a pair of old shoes, a hammock, a rope ladder, and the house their dad nailed together dominated Carrie’s yard. Beneath the green canopy, Carrie's dad stretched in his hammock, turned his head to the side, and pulled the tab from a can of cold beer. The neighbor-men gave audience in lawn chairs constructed of canvas lattice and aluminum. Carrie's dad reminded the small girl from across the road of the king ape in the Jungle Book movie, his round belly poking up while most of him was concealed by the sailcloth hammock.

The men drank, laughed, smoked, laughed. The women buzzed like flies trying to get through the kitchen door only to be shooed back into the yard by Carrie's mom, who held her court serving sun-tea at the picnic table near the grill. The little girl weaved her way through the older children, the women, the babies collected in one playpen, and found herself near the men. Watermelon juice dribbled, cold at first, from her chin to her chest and down her hands and arms, drying in the same heat that made the beer cans sweat. Tacky streams stretched from fingers to elbows like pink lace gloves. How she dreaded her mother's unavoidable notice of her ruined sundress. Startled from one fear to another, the child heard her name spoken beneath the trees and laughter aimed at her.

Carrie's dad said, "Come here, I'll tell you a secret." The little girl lacked patience for secrets and men with dark stubble who smelled like beer. She preferred to observe life unobserved and backed away, wishing for the speed of the cats that refused her affections. More clumsy than quick, in her flawed haste her own father, a blonde man even bigger than Carrie's dad, cajoled her. When that failed, the larger man looked down over his sunglasses, pierced his daughter with his blue eyes, and pointed wordlessly with his cigarette toward the darker man. Defeated, the child slinked to the hammock, her paper plate gone vertical, watermelon juice sprinkled over the grass.

Carrie's dad leaned over the child's shoulder, grazing her bare summer skin with his scratchy chin. Her wispy neck and tender cheek absorbed the malted moisture that carried his words. He whispered to her, softer than snow, "Don't eat the seeds, you'll grow a melon in your belly." The little girl scampered away, with an irreversible dislike for the fruit and fear of the seed, even the soft white ones.

The woman reflects on her life, the time she slept over at Carrie's and was told no one was allowed to sleep in their panties. She didn’t sleep until after she called her mother in the middle of the night only to be sent back to bed. Three decades stand between moments, but the woman can’t shake waking in the strange bunk bed to see Carrie's dad, naked in the living room, preening, his children, touching his body, or how she turned to the wall pretending to sleep. She considers the moment Carrie confided her father’s sins against his other daughter. The girl was then too old to pretend and too young to react. Yet, she was never surprised, always suspecting more than she was told. The woman wonders if she missed something he said or if, at age three, she felt the roots of truth escape his teeth to settle under her skin.