“How good the past can look from a rest stop in a bitter future!”

“Somehow it felt familiar, an old story retold, the claws in my shoulder, my arms twisted behind my back, the drag down the street, Will assisting my father and thinking how much fun it was to hunt someone down. I knew it all. Each snarled command was a line from an old but faithless song. “Pipe down! I’m not going to hurt you! I just want to talk to you! This is for your own good!”

“Discovery is the chance they never had, to tell, on oath, how wickedness infects a life. One’s only life. Beyond one’s will, evil comes, looking for a surprise soft spot, a place to inject its poison.”

“Yes, indeed, I am the stuff, the prize property, the recaptured trophy he will put up on the mantelpiece, in a rage every time I move a millimeter or look less polished, less tarted up than he thinks I should look. In a rage, every time I disappoint him. Which will happen every day.”

“Imagine! How the world has changed in only twenty years! Only evil stays the same, year after year.”

“Why were we so full of hope in those days? Looking back, I see so clearly that violence was worsening. Living through that time, we didn’t see that. We believed in our capacity to grow a great country. A just society.”

“I could feel the hard part of Mom very strongly that time. It was like a stone in her that grew bigger every time my father lost his temper, right under her heart. Feeling the stone in her calmed me down. It told me that she would always be there for me.”