“I’d appreciate it if you’d give it to her anyway, Mr. Glenn,” Luke said.

Daddy closed the door in Luke’s face.

“You didn’t have a reason to treat him like that,” I said, as Luke’s pickup bumped back down the drive. “He just wanted to share a book.”

I kept my voice low because Momma was sleeping.

“He’s been up here not even a year and wants to tell us how to live,” Daddy said. “What we can do and not do, when Glenns and Winchesters have been in this valley two hundred years.”

Daddy looked at me, the anger clear on his face if not in the volume of his voice.

“And you supporting them,” Daddy said. “If that’s what going to college does to you, I ought not have let you go in the first place.”

“You didn’t let me go,” I said. “I went, and with no help from you. I wouldn’t be there if I didn’t have a scholarship.”

“No help but eighteen years of clothing and feeding you,” Daddy said. “Keeping a roof over your head. And it didn’t seem to make no difference to you when it was pulpwood money that bought your back-to-school clothes and paid the grocery and doctor bills.”

“Maybe there wouldn’t have been so many doctor bills if you hadn’t needed a pack of cigarettes so bad.”

Daddy didn’t say anything for a few seconds. The anger that tensed his features became something harder to define, more unsettling.

Momma coughed in the back room. I could hear the mattress springs as she shifted in the bed.

“I ain’t letting you take my truck to no more of those meetings,” he finally said.

“I’ll get a ride with Billy then,” I said, “and if he isn’t going I’ll walk.”

“I’ll not burden your mother with this,” Daddy said, his teeth clinched to keep his voice low. “She’s got enough to handle without knowing you’re siding against the very people you’ve grown up among.”

And that made me madder, his bringing Momma into it, because Momma had never mattered before when we’d had our fights. She’d never allowed herself to matter. What remorse I might have felt about my hospital bill comment slipped away like smoke.

“That’s not what I’m doing,” I said. “No more than Billy or Earl Wilkinson are.”

“That is what you’re doing,” Daddy said, “and them others as well.”

“You’re just too ignorant to understand,” I said, and in my mind I saw another layer added to the wall we’d created between us.