Question: Build a movie plot around this: Why does Lily not have a mother? She shot her mother when she was 4 years old.
Answer:
The movie opens in 1964, during the civil rights movement. Lily is almost fourteen years old and has an abusive father and no mother. In the first scene, a woman in a dress wanders around a room and goes back and forth in a closet. A marble rolls on the ground and a little girl is playing with a clear glass shooter marble and a mirror. The mother, Deborah Owens (Hilarie Burton) is taking clothes from the closet and putting them into a suitcase. Suddenly a man barges in and starts to rage at her, saying that she isn't going to leave him. He throws the suitcase onto the ground and grabs her roughly. The woman reaches for a gun in the closet and points it at the man, telling him that she just wants to go. The man wrestles the gun out of her hand and it falls on the ground. The child's hand goes to pick up the gun. The gun goes off and the scene fades to an older Lily lying in bed, her eyes open."I killed my mother when I was four years old. That's what I knew about myself. She was all I wanted and I took her away. Nothing else much matters," says Lily's voice over.In the middle of the night, Lily sees hundreds of bees in her room and runs to tell her father, T. Ray (Paul Bettany), who yells at her to go back to bed. Frustrated, Lily runs into their peach orchard and digs up a box she buried there. The box contains her mother's gloves, a small photograph of her mother, and a scrap of wood with a picture of the Virgin Mary on it. Lily puts on her mother's gloves, partially unbuttons her blouse, and holds the photograph close to her heart. While she lies on the soft dirt, staring at the stars, she hears her father calling her. Hurriedly, she takes off the gloves and slips the items back into the box and starts to bury it. While she is buttoning her blouse, her father approaches her and yells for "whoever was out there with her". He grabs her arm and runs her into the house, then shouts, "You tryin' to get yourself pregnant?!" He pours a box of grits onto the floor and without further speech, Lily kneels onto the...