They travel on for a while in silence. The woman drifts for a moment, remembering. Only the constant blinking of his lashes, captured by the milky light from the dashboard, betrays that the man is still awake. Watching the road. His head starts to turn but stops midway through the gesture. He reaches for a cigarette instead and, without asking, fires it up. Flicks the paper match out the slit of an open window.

“He could control us so easily, my father. All of us, right down the line, from my mother to every one of the children. Well, almost. Six older brothers and sisters and only one of them would ever think about taking him on. Verbally or otherwise. Well, of course not physically, I don’t mean that—we weren’t animals, raised on a farm or not. We were not savages, but I’m just saying that there was never a moment when he wasn’t in complete control of us. Most all of us. He had the last word on everything, from the chores to our schoolwork to which people we dated. If we dated, that is. One of my sisters—not Lily, the oldest, not her, but the middle one, the redhead, Sarah—she was not allowed to go out with a boy until she was almost eighteen. Can you imagine? I mean, people married at that age back then; were married and had a family started by the time she was able to go off to the movies with someone. And why?—you might ask why or be thinking it there as you’re driving … because he saw something in her, a willfulness, maybe, a sort of spirit that he felt he had to break. That’s what I believe it was, personally, when I think back on it. He felt a kind of power in her that the rest of us didn’t possess. A desire to be her own person, and he was not going to have any of that in his house. ‘Not under my roof,’ I used to hear him saying to her when they argued, out behind the barn or downstairs at night after I’d gone up to bed—I was ten years younger and so my bedtime was early in those days. The shouts of my sister and the quiet force of my father would ring out as I drifted off. It was only when she was about eighteen, as I said, that he finally allowed her any freedom in that way, to attend a film or go dancing or that type of thing. And a few months after that, of course, she was gone.”