For the first time she sensed that she could have stayed inside that restaurant for hours—ordered food for one or two meals, lingered over dessert, and that still she could have come outside and found that car waiting for her in exactly the same spot as it stood in now—a red rock of unwavering conviction in which feet were firmly planted and never budged. She admired this fact about her husband. His persistent, blind, nearly doglike devotion to certain principles. Her father had tried to tell her before she got married that such men were better suited to plowing fields like donkeys than raising families, but she rejected that judgment on the grounds that their world was already changing fast enough, and that it was better to be tied to a donkey than to nothing at all. She opened the passenger door and took her seat next to her husband, placing her hand gently on top of his. Even though the car was an automatic he continued to drive with his hand next to the emergency brake, an imaginary gearshift that gave him a greater sense of control over his actions.
