Redemption Song

"To have your entire childhood missing your father's signature on the report card — you notice these things, you know," she says. "I was fairly insistent that there would be a parental relationship."

Karen mailed Ken copies of the girls' favorite books, which he would read into a cassette recorder and send back. That's what passed for a bedtime story in the Lamberton house.

The girls dreaded visiting their father.

"I think when we were younger, it was like going to the grocery store as a kid," says Kasondra. "You just don't want to do it. As I got older, it got more scary."

Melissa remembers the prison dogs.

"I remember having to stand against the back and this huge German shepherd that was bigger than me would have to sniff me," she says. "I think we were a little scared of the guards just in general. I was more afraid of them than I was of any of the convicts."

Welfare kept the family going until 1991, when Karen lost her eligibility.

Since the time Ken had gone to jail, Karen had been driving an extremely old car. It had no seat belts. She had to hot-wire it to get it going.

On a trip to California, the girls piled into their aunt's car. She turned the key and the car started. The girls were amazed.

"Does it always do that?" they wanted to know. "Do you always turn the key and it starts?"

Horrified at what Karen had been driving, her sister bought herself a new car and gave Karen the old one.

Unfortunately, the car was worth about $9,000. Under Department of Economic Security guidelines at the time, a person on welfare could only have $2,500 in assets, and only $1,500 of that could be a car. DES told her she had to sell the car and spend all the money in order to stay on welfare.

She said no. She needed the car.

She did some research and learned that the requirement wasn't made nationwide.

So she challenged the decision. And she won twice — initially, and then on appeal, at which point hers became a class action lawsuit, merged with similar cases.

Eventually she got off welfare voluntarily when she finished school and got a job. Karen's graduation from college wasn't the end of the family's struggle, but it certainly helped.

Life kept going for all those years. Science projects and school concerts and trips out to the prison. The girls couldn't deny or forget the fact that dad was in prison, and explaining it to people wasn't easy.

When she did have to explain to her friends, Melissa says she did it by degrees.

"I answered in the same way my mom answered me when I was asking. She answered in degrees," she recalls. "When I was a little girl she would say he ran away from home and he took things that didn't belong to him. As I got older I understood he had committed adultery, so I thought that was the reason. As I got older she would explain in deeper degrees. So I used the same pattern with my friends. I was like, 'I can't explain it to you any other way. He's a sex offender. He's in prison.'"

The visits saved him, Ken says. Early on, he was at the Santa Rita unit of the Arizona State Prison, in Tucson, which at least was close to Karen, making visits easier.

Always an outdoors type, Lamberton used the nature he saw around him in prison as a mental escape. He became a bird watcher, marking his time in jail with the migration of the birds.

Bird watchers keep obsessive lists of the birds they've spotted, where they spotted them, when. It was a perfect prison pastime.

"A lot of my first birds were there," he says. "There was a robin, which was kind of a surprise. There were lots of hawks — red-tailed hawks and Cooper's hawks chasing doves around."

He became more focused than ever on nature. It gave him a sense of freedom to watch birds or hunt for tadpoles on the yard.

"The stuff I could see on the yard were similar to what my daughters could see, so it would give us things to talk about," he says. "Among the rosebushes, there were toads that would come up after it rained, and just to hear those toads singing or see them hopping around on the yard connected me in a lot of ways to my children who were doing the same thing at home."

In 1989, he started going to a writers' workshop run by Richard Shelton, an English professor at the University of Arizona. He says it changed his life.

Shelton remembers that Lamberton was very shy when they first met.

"He was young. Good-looking. Terrified," recalls Shelton. "He introduced himself, but he was so soft-spoken that I couldn't understand what he said."

Once he got comfortable, Lamberton became a leader. Unfortunately, his writing wasn't great.

"He was writing terrible stuff. Religious stuff mostly." says Shelton. "I knew he was a biologist. I said, 'You shouldn't be messing around with this other stuff, you should be writing in your field.'"