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Rachel and Beth’s Father
After her divorce from Rachel and Beth’s father, Rachel and Beth’s mother marries an abusive conman who ends up kidnapping her and Beth, nearly beating their mother to death, and ruining her relationships with all of her children for years to come. When they got married, he took her and Beth to the Southwest, sold their car, and then forced them to travel on buses and hide out with him in hotels for several months, because he was convinced that the government was persecuting him. Rachel suggests that this experience might have influenced Beth’s obsession with buses, and her narration implies that her mother married the conman because he promised her an all-consuming relationship that would help her escape from her depression and other everyday problems. (Needless to say, he ended up making these problems far worse.) In addition to driving much of Rachel and Beth’s family drama—particularly their long estrangement from their mother—he shows how dangerous it can be to confuse love with power and control over others.
The Abusive Conman Quotes in Riding the Bus with My Sister
The Riding the Bus with My Sister quotes below are all either spoken by The Abusive Conman or refer to The Abusive Conman . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
30. October: Come Home, Little Girl
Quotes
I discover that [my mother] is not the cold-hearted, mayhem-loving monster I’d imagined, but a deeply unhappy and lonely woman who somehow got caught up with a violent con man, an event that fills her with shame. […] After Beth had been sent away, he’d almost beaten my mother to death—and only then, finally, had she fled, with fifty-seven cents in her hand.
I realize I need to learn forgiveness and compassion. Little by little, season after season, my days stop seeming so dark and my nights so scary.
I tell Laura how much better I feel, that my depression is lifting; I can even write again. I tell her that it may be the hardest thing she ever does in her life, but that if she can face it, she can do anything. She relents as she listens, and one day she too picks up the phone.
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Get the entire Riding the Bus with My Sister LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Abusive Conman Quotes in Riding the Bus with My Sister
The Riding the Bus with My Sister quotes below are all either spoken by The Abusive Conman or refer to The Abusive Conman . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
30. October: Come Home, Little Girl
Quotes
I discover that [my mother] is not the cold-hearted, mayhem-loving monster I’d imagined, but a deeply unhappy and lonely woman who somehow got caught up with a violent con man, an event that fills her with shame. […] After Beth had been sent away, he’d almost beaten my mother to death—and only then, finally, had she fled, with fifty-seven cents in her hand.
I realize I need to learn forgiveness and compassion. Little by little, season after season, my days stop seeming so dark and my nights so scary.
I tell Laura how much better I feel, that my depression is lifting; I can even write again. I tell her that it may be the hardest thing she ever does in her life, but that if she can face it, she can do anything. She relents as she listens, and one day she too picks up the phone.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
