Snow HER PARENTS FIGHT when they think Frances isn’t listening. Her mother brings up the truck over and over. How could Basie have done that, bought the truck without telling her? She keeps harping at him. Maybe, she says, that was Joe Fletcher’s plan all along—to marry Frances, an only child, and end up with a profitable farm instead of that liability he owns in the bush. Basie played right into his hands, she says, by buying him that new truck. Basie listens, or doesn’t listen, until he says something like, “Judas Priest, give it a rest.” Frances thinks that she caused this; she brought this discord into the house. She worries that her father doesn’t care about her anymore. He’s hardly spoken a word to her since she left Joe Fletcher. Then finally, finally, on the morning she is to embark on her new life, he says something that expresses at least the possibility that he cares what happens to her. At the breakfast table, he says to Alice, “You’re sure about this room you’ve rented—that it’s a proper family she’s moving in with?”
