Waco, Texas

Fifteen minutes, and the story ends exactly where it always meant to. Ethel keeps choosing hope past the point hope can hold, keeping the pictures where the world can see them, picking names for children, believing in Nebraska dreaming, while Willoughby, a second offbeat and falling apart, decides that love is not enough to keep them in the world. She turns her back for a moment and he comes apart in it.

She would rather die than be anything but his, and she says so without flinching. She will do anything for him, and has said it so many times the words have worn smooth. Time may forgive her, she allows, but she will not. The record closes on that vow and lets it ring out into instrumental dark, the youth of the whole saga ending on the exact threshold where Preacher’s Daughter opens its first door.