The devotion: front-row movies at the Paducah -plexes, batons, "prettier than this one or that one"

pivotal · UNDATED (Joelle's childhood, Shiny Prize)

• When: UNDATED (Joelle's girlhood, pre-puberty; Shiny Prize / Paducah)
• What: The father-daughter bond, in both tellings, runs on movies and batons. Joelle's own memory (scene 062, minutes before her overdose): she and her own personal Daddy in the front row of the narrow overinsulated Paducah -plexes, "up in neck-crick territory," her hand in his lap, Crackerjacks, a wooden match in the corner of his mouth, "telling Joelle over and over again how she was prettier than this one or that one right there" up on the screen — and standing in the ticket line, "she'd never so much again as in that line felt so taken care of," a feeling she says returned only with freebase cocaine (the comparison is Joelle's own, scene 062). Notkin's account matches the shape: he took her to movies "on a near-daily basis, in Kentucky," and drove her all over the mid-South for junior baton-twirling competitions while the mother stayed home on the farm (scene 159). At home he was total presence — Joelle's memory again: he trailed her from room to room "talking batons and low-pH chemistry," "It was like when she exhaled he inhaled and vice versa"; her mother said she hardly even tried to talk to him when his Pokie was home (scene 150; "Pokie" was Joelle's family nickname — her mother never called her anything but Joelle). The tenderness is specific: he called eye-corner sleep-goo "eye-boogers" and got them out for her with the twisted corner of his hankie (scene 150). And the mother's side of the triangle is planted early, in Joelle's memory: she'd known her mother didn't much like her "from the first time her own personal Daddy'd told her he'd rather take Pokie to the pictures alone" (scene 150).