Chapter 49
THE CANNED stew I’d eaten for breakfast staged a rebellion in my guts. My knees almost buckled from the surprise. Being asked about a s****l assault on me, which Alice had been an inadvertent part of, hadn’t been what I thought I’d be doing when I woke up this morning. But something had put it on my karmic to-do list, right after “fight off a chunk of Absolute” and “help my other adopted daughter chill out enough to stop pulling steel apart like taffy.”
Alice was fourteen years old. She was my Julie’s friend.
No parent wants to talk about s*x with their kids. Sheila and I had each talked with Julie every four months since she was ten. It never got any easier, but I got accustomed to it. Sheila had put recurring reminders on our calendars, staggered two months apart. s*x was a
