“All right,” I said. “My father was fanatical. Actually, that’s putting it mildly. He thought the world was going to hell, and since the ‘lunatic’ Californians were buying up all the land around us, he sold our farm and moved us to a little town in Utah of ninety-six people. We made it an even hundred.”

“What town?”

“You’ve never heard of it.”

“Try me.”

“Montezuma Creek.”

“You’re right,” he said. “Why there?”

“Because it was about as far from civilization as you could get. And, don’t laugh, because there was only one road into town and he could blow it up when the Russians invaded.”

“Really?”

“It’s true,” I said. “He had a whole shed of dynamite and black powder.” I shook my head. “The biggest thing that ever happened in Montezuma Creek was when the Harlem Globetrotters came through town. I don’t know what brought them to such a small town. I guess they weren’t that big anymore, but the whole town showed up. I think the whole county showed up.”

“What did your father do in Montezuma Creek? To provide?”

“We had greenhouses. Big ones. We mostly grew tomatoes. We sold them to Safeway.”

“How did you end up in Salt Lake?”

“I just got out as fast as I could.”

“Didn’t like the small-town life?”

“I didn’t like my father,” I said softly. “He talked constantly about the end of days and the world being evil and corrupt, but the truth is, he was evil and corrupt. And violent and cruel. I lived in constant fear of him. I remember I was at our town’s little grocery store when a man I’d never met said to me, ‘I feel sorry for you.’ When I asked why, he said, ‘That you have that father. He is one awful man.’

“My father was always trying to prove that he was in control. Once I told him I was excited because we were going to have a dance lesson at school, so he made me stay home that day for no reason. Some days he would keep us home from school just to prove that the government couldn’t tell him what to do.

“He would rant that the police were just the henchmen of an Orwellian government conspiracy, and anytime one tried to pull him over, he’d try to outrun them. It was a perverse game with him. Sometimes he’d get away, sometimes they’d catch him, and they’d drag him out of the car and handcuff him, which only proved his point that the police were brutal. He lost his license, but that was irrelevant to him. He didn’t see that the government had any right to tell a person whether they could drive or not.