1. The concept of building roads obviously connects the younger dad to his daughter, Jancy. The road acts as a symbol both of wandering and of escape—as Jancy likes to do—as well as of connection. “The people I care about are far apart,” Jancy even tells her father at one point, trying to justify her travel. “I don’t get many chances to see them” (BT 131). What Phillips suggests by making the father a former road builder is that “escape” and “home” are, in fact, stages in life. Jay McInerney concedes this when speaking of the story “Bess” in his review of Fast Lanes: Bess, a seemingly homebound character—”slow and steady”—of Machine Dreams, “is revealed here [in the story] as one of Ms. Phillips’s runaways” (7).