You know, Sammie, I can still hear his lectures of life, You can be anything you want to be. I always dropped my head down.Oh no, here we go again. Ye... Dad. I know, I know. I always got The Look when I said those words. He would pull down his large black-framed glasses and look over them at me. Uhm. The usual reply. I usually got As and a few Bs in school. I could have applied myself more, but I had a lot of chores to do. Feeding and tending to our horses, fixing broken fences, and working on. It was bright red with a reindeer cartoon sewn on the front with a jinglebell on its nose."It's kind of embarrassing, but yes. I love it," I said. "It reminds meof you at Christmas."Mom smiled warmly. "So you wouldn't be embarrassed to run around townwith it on? With that bell dangling and jingling from your breasts,people would hear you for miles around," she said."I know," I said excitedly. "Wouldn't that be cool?" Yes, it would be," she replied as she found the same sweater in my sizeand. He gulped his scotch until he tongued bitter, melting ice. He was on the verge of destroying that newspaper as it represented madness; forty dead here and fifty dead there, the face of this radical Jew, her beauty, and her inexorable animosity. The cold ice melted in his mouth. Arms pumping against the endless sea, head in the water, gasping for breath, moving slowly towards a shore he would never reach.“Bartender, another scotch!” he yelled into the air.“Don’t you think you’ve had enough,. Page had given her very specific instructions about how she was to comport herself. Willow was not to get off the bench or make a sound unless she felt Page was in physical danger of harm or death. She was to watch and to learn. Willow was not sure what she was supposed to learn, but she would try.She had been kneeling for more than an hour and her knees were hurting. She might have thought to complain, but the gag prevented her from speaking. Also her sore knees were nothing compared to what.