Old as she was, she still missed her daddy sometimes.

The line underscores how grief and longing for parental care are not outgrown with age. By juxtaposing “Old as she was” with the childlike “daddy,” Naylor compresses a lifetime into a single emotional truth: adulthood can add responsibilities and resilience, but it does not erase the need for tenderness, protection, or the particular intimacy of a father-daughter bond. The sentence’s plainness heightens its force; it reads like an unadorned admission that vulnerability persists beneath social expectations of stoicism. In Naylor’s fiction, such moments often illuminate how private wounds endure within broader histories of family strain and communal survival.