Abide with Me

by Elizabeth Strout

But there was a softness in her face, a touching hesitancy, as though she had spent many years trying to be cheerful and no longer was, but the remnants of an earlier, eager kindness still remained. Her features had not hardened, in other words, and there were many women in that region whose features had hardened, women who had faces that could, by middle age, be the face of a man, but this was not the case for Connie Hatch.

“Isn’t it a characteristic of a grown man, in contrast to an immature person, that his center of gravity is always where he actually is?”

A feeling of calm filled him, but he knew it was not to be trusted, that it signified only that something inside him had shut down,

“No one, to my knowledge, has figured out the secret to love. We love imperfectly, Tyler. We all do. Even Jesus wrestled with that. But I think—I think the ability to receive love is as important as the ability to give it. It’s one and the same, really.