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- Lying awake at night, Billie Jo feels herself full of bitterness about the dust, her father’s silence, and her mother’s absence. She feels that her father once loved her, and she’s given him chances to understand her and reach out and love her again, but he isn’t taking them.
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Billie Jo knows her father would have rather had a son than a daughter, and it shows: he raises Billie Jo like a son and teaches her to do all the things a man would traditionally do around the homestead.
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Despite his many faults and inability to communicate, Billie Jo's father loves her. He shows it in his actions, as when he searches for her all night when she is caught in the dust storm...
The second poem, “The Empty Spaces,” speaks of Billie Jo's isolation from her father. She feels like he is a stranger, and she wants to be alone yet is scared of solitude. Her...
After a week, Billie Jo returns home and convinces her father to see a doctor. She calls him "Daddy" for the first time since the incident. The two even start to gain each other's trust again. She then meets Louise, a woman who stayed with her father while Billie was on the run.
Billie Jo also feels angry towards her father for having left the pail of kerosene in the kitchen in the first place. She wonders if she can ever forgive him. Feeling guilty and despondent, Billie Jo runs away.
Billie Jo’s failure to recognize her father is both literal and metaphorical—his physical appearance is altered from the storm, and she does not recognize the person he has turned into since her mother’s death.
Lying awake at night, Billie Jo feels herself full of bitterness about the dust, her father’s silence, and her mother’s absence. She feels that her father once loved her, and she’s given him chances to understand her and reach out and love her again, but he isn’t taking them.
