But it is hard for her to break into the cocoon of mutual narcissistic regard being woven in the back seat. From the little overpass road, dark farmland seems to stretch in every direction, broken only by a Gulf station, its towering oval sign aglow, level with the profile of the hills. Nelson asks the back seat, “What do you think, Annabelle? How far would the older man have gone? The father figure?”

Her gentle voice arrives: “Nelson, what are you asking?”

“How far did Mr. Byer go with you? My gut tells me,” he says, recklessly wheeling through the entrance ramp and heading down the highway toward where Brewer’s dome of light stains the sky, “he went pretty far. That’s why you’re always saying what a great guy he was. He wasn’t. He was into touchy-feely. A good thing he died when you were sixteen, it might have got a lot worse.”

“Baby,” Pru says to her husband, but there is no stopping him, now that he and the Corolla are headed in the right direction. He needs to undress his sister, in front of Billy.

“And your mother was no help, was she? She was a savvy old tramp, she must have guessed. She’d been through the mill, why not you, huh?”

“That’s not true!” Annabelle cries. “She never knew anything! And he never—what’s the word?—”

“Penetrated,” Nelson offers.

“Exactly!” she says. “He just groped, all in the name of parental affection, of course.” This bit of sarcasm pries her open; she makes a strange shuddering prolonged sound of upheaved regret, then pours out, sobs making her gasp, “I didn’t dare ask him to stop, he’d handled me since I was a baby, it didn’t seem right, yet how could it be very wrong? It was as if he couldn’t help it, he was, like, sleepwalking. He’d tuck me in afterwards.”

“He knew what you didn’t know,” Nelson points out. “That he wasn’t your real father. And your mother knew it too.”

“She had no idea what he was doing, I’m positive. But it was so much a relief when he died that I blamed myself. It had got to be a secret between us, as if I wanted it too, when I hated it!” Her tears are coming freely now, pent-up, accusing. Nelson squints into the high headlights, trucks and those fucking SUVs, that afflict his eyes from behind and ahead. The traffic is hurrying in both directions toward some disaster, the end of time as they’ve known it. Annabelle goes the next step, crying, “I felt I’d killed him! Good for me!” Her round face flashes in his rearview mirror, one teary eye meeting his.

“Right,” Nelson says calmly. “It really screwed you up with men since, didn’t it? How come, do you think, you’ve never married?”