“I remember watching him being handcuffed and arrested, and I was afraid they were going to take me to jail too. I grew up terrified of police. Police and snakes.”

“Snakes?” Nicholas said.

I nodded. “My father used to think it was funny to chase me around the house with live rattlesnakes. I remember him holding one on a stick and it trying to strike at me.” I looked down. “I have a terrible phobia of snakes. I can’t even see a picture of one without being paralyzed with fear.”

“That’s abuse,” Nicholas said.

I nodded. “He was all about abuse. Only he didn’t see it that way. He saw us as property, and, if something is yours, you can do what you want to it. Property doesn’t have needs. Property only exists to suit to your needs.

“One time we had a problem with our truck. He said it was the carburetor, so he made my sister lie on the engine under the hood and pour gasoline into the carburetor while we drove. What kind of father puts his kid under the hood of a moving vehicle?”

“A deranged one,” Nicholas said. “What were his parents like?”

“That’s the strange part. My grandparents were sweet people. They used to apologize to me about him. Once my grandmother said, ‘We don’t know what happened to him, dear.’

“He considered reading for entertainment a waste of time. Once he found me in my room reading a Mary Higgins Clark book and he was furious. He called me lazy and said that if I had time to waste, he’d find something for me to do. He made me go out and move the entire woodpile from one side of the house to the other. It took me four hours. And I was terrified the whole time, because snakes hid in the woodpile. Twice I found rattlesnakes when bringing in firewood.”

Nicholas looked sad. “I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks,” I said. “More than anything, I just wanted to be loved. In a small town like that, there aren’t a lot of romantic options. Once I told my father that a boy walked me home from school, and my father beat me and sent me to my room for the night. He called me a tramp. I believed him. I felt so guilty about it.”

“You couldn’t see that you’d done nothing wrong?”

I shook my head. “The thing is, when you grow up with crazy, you don’t know what sane is. You might suspect that there’s something better, but until you see reality, it’s impossible to comprehend.

“A year after I was married I caught my father with another woman. They were kissing. He lied about it at first, but when he saw that I didn’t believe him, he admitted that he was having an affair and told me not to tell my mother.”

“Did you?”