Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)

by Elizabeth Strout

“I wonder how many people in long marriages live with ghosts beside them.”

We are necessarily influenced by those who have come before us.

But it went through his head unbidden: the story that Olive had told Lucy about living with a ghost in one’s marriage, because he thought: I will tell Lucy about Pam, and she will care.

“What in hell is a sin-eater?” Lucy shook her head slowly. “Some people on this earth eat other people’s sins, and that’s what Janice did her entire life, starting with her father and her stepmother and then with that professor creep—who, had he behaved that way now, would be outed and fired—and then crazy Oliver that she got involved with after dropping out. She just kept eating people’s sins.”

THERE ARE VERY FEW PEOPLE IN THE WORLD WE FEEL CONNECTED TO. I FEEL CONNECTED TO YOU. LOVE, OLIVE

Why did a child move so far away if she did not want to live a whole new life? Even Isabelle had said that, and she and Olive had that in common, Olive’s son, Christopher, was living in New York City when he could have stayed so much closer—

And then Lucy had told him about gaslighting, that this was something narcissists do, and he had not exactly understood the concept. But he understood now, when Margaret had turned it on him, saying that she lived every day of her life aware of his childhood trauma. They love being the center of attention. They cannot take criticism. They are controlling. They talk about themselves all the time. They are not empathic. Though this one gave Bob hope: Margaret was very compassionate about her congregants. In fact, about many people.

But then this: They like to think that they can save the world, there is often a grandiosity to them, and when they do good things for people they do so because it makes them feel bigger.

Bob was aware—as Lucy herself had said—that he did not know her as well as he thought he did. Isn’t that what she had said? We are all standing on shifting sand.

I wonder how many people out there are able to be strong—or strong enough—because of the person they’re married to.”

“Most of us have a few more reserves, though in truth probably not that many, but enough to get us through things. But Muddy and Diana just didn’t.”

These are broken people. Big difference between being a broken person and being evil. In case you don’t know. And if you don’t think everyone is broken in some

way, you’re wrong. I’m telling you this because you have been so fortunate in your life, you probably don’t even know such broken people exist.”

“But right now, you have no sympathy from me. You are still too young. And you have had my sympathy your whole life, but when you say your father is evil, well, your father is not evil. Is he broken? Yes, we’re all broken. Frankly.”

“We also discussed that day a crush without consequences that a person can have in a marriage and how that’s very different from living with a ghost in the marriage. Now, I have thought all along that you and Lucy lived each with the ghost of the other, but I saw tonight that I was wrong. What you had was a crush.”

Because Bob, being Bob, saved us both from getting together in that way, which would have been a terrible mistake. And I understood after a while that—I told you I thought Bob was a sin-eater—that he was eating my sin of wanting him, oh that poor man! And then later I agreed to marry

Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love. If it is love, then it is love.”