I asked her, weeks later, why he knew it.

I had built up a whole thing in my head about it, and the thing in my head had her teaching it to him — deliberately, as a link to a father he did not have, which would have been a generous act and would have meant something about her feelings that I very much wanted it to mean.

And Carmen said: “I didn’t teach it to him.”

“Then how—”

“Wes, I sang it to him every night for four years.

That’s not teaching.

He absorbed it the way he absorbed my accent.”

“Why that one?”

And she said, “Because it was the only one I knew all the way through.”

Then she said the rest of it, in the flat voice she uses for the worst things, which I had forgotten and which came back to me all at once.