“You know, there was a time—maybe only a few weeks or so—when people began to talk. I mean, the talk about her leaving, there was a change in the mood of it. And not in any good sense of the word. ‘Talk.’ I mean to imply that it was gossip, horrible gossip like nothing you could imagine. We would catch snatches of it at school or church or in places like those, spots where gossip never had any business being. Yet there it was. Some folks said that she hadn’t gone, had never left the farm at all but—well, I suppose there’s no way around it, whom they were implicating: my father. That he had stopped my sister in some way, hurt her, even, and then hidden her somewhere out on the land because of that reckless spirit of hers. What a thing to say! Can you imagine it, even a whisper of that being said about a family? Thankfully, I was very young and most of it never … it wasn’t until years later, talking to my mother as a married woman, that I realized what had transpired that summer. The kinds of stories that were being told. I don’t know how she made it through that, my mother, I really don’t. To lose a daughter in that way—have her run away—and then suffer through the humiliation and pain of that sort of speculation from your peers. Well, I can’t imagine it. But she was a strong woman, oh yes, of Norwegian heritage and very practical, and somehow she put one foot in front of the other, like she did every other day, and just kept going. I think I have a lot of her in me, a good deal of her, anyway. I like to think so. And whatever I am, I don’t relish the notion that I’m more like my father. No, I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to distance myself from that man and part of the effort was marrying a person who was different as well. You, my dear, are about as different as a man could be from him, and I love you for that. I do, I do.”

A truck zips past and disappears into the murk, causing the car to shudder and swerve toward the shoulder. The man grips the wheel and regains control. Cursing quietly to himself. Afterward, the woman places a hand on the man’s knee and gently toys with the fabric of his slacks. The man looks over at her for a moment, only turning away when she smiles at him. She removes her hand slowly from his thigh, in stages.