Chapter 4 (pages 222-250) Summary

Nelson is in a bad mood over some Spanish political labor issue and the narrator trying to cheer him up finds herself rebuffed. He wants to be angry. This is disturbing to her after growing up with an emotionally unstable mother. She remembers how she finally got her driver's license and borrowed a car to take her mother to a lakeside cabin getaway the kind of thing her mother had never gotten to do. Her mother, too heavy to lift the suitcase into the trunk, left it behind the car thinking the narrator would put it in the trunk, which she did not see it and backed over it with the car. It was a new suitcase given to her mother by her therapist and she said, the nicest thing anyone had ever given her totally ignoring the gift...