“How will I live without him?”Īs if in answer, the back door cracked open. Mom looked up, sad-eyed, her cheeks streaked with tears. “Let me have that,” she said tiredly, taking the burning cigarette, putting it out in the ashtray on the floor beside her. She picked her way through the broken pieces of glass and knelt at her mother’s side. Nothing ever changed, and Jolene was the one who had to clean up every mess. Now she was impatient with all of it, wearied by the drama of her parents’ marriage. But too many nights like this had hardened her. Scattered across the floor were remnants of the fight: bottles and ashtrays and broken bits of glass.Įven a few years ago, Jolene would have tried to make her mother feel better. She found her mother in the living room, sitting slumped on the sofa, a lit Camel cigarette dangling from her mouth. She crept down the narrow staircase, hearing the risers creak beneath her weight. There was only one light in here, a bulb that hung from the rafters like the last tooth in an old man’s mouth, loose and unreliable. Jolene made her way through her steeply pitched bedroom, ducking so she wouldn’t konk her head on one of the rough timbered support beams. Oh, Ralph … you scared me … I’m sorry, give me one more chance, please, you know I love you so much … Mom would rush to him, sobbing, and take him in her arms. He’d come slinking into the kitchen, sober and remorseful, stinking of booze and cigarettes. He’d be back tomorrow or the next day, whenever he ran out of money. He had left the house in a fury (was there any other way?), slamming the door shut behind him. Then came a crash-something big had been thrown against the wall. Sometimes she would cry as she said the terrible words, sometimes her bitterness would be palpable, but in the end it didn’t matter how she sounded what mattered was the tragic truth of her one-sided love. Her mother’s answer was always the same: I can’t.

For years, Jolene had asked her mother why they didn’t just leave him-her father-and steal away in the night. Then came the screaming and the crying, the throwing of things. Glasses full of bourbon, refilled again and again. It started with their drinking, of course. The mood at home was always precarious, but on this day when the television ran ads for flowers and chocolates and red foil hearts, love became a weapon in her parents’ careless hands.

She’d grown up in the midst of a marriage gone bad. She might only be seventeen, but Jolene Larsen already knew about war. Others-and this she knew firsthand-were battlefields, bloody and dark, littered with shrapnel and body parts. The way she saw it, some families were like well-tended parks, with pretty daffodil borders and big, sprawling trees that offered respite from the summer sun.

Night road hannah