More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
He had long ago stopped looking like anyone familiar.
People could surprise you. Not just their kindness, but also their sudden ability to express things the right way.
You are decent and strong, and none of this has anything to do with me; but you came through it, that childhood that wasn’t all roses, and I’m proud of you, I’m amazed by you.
“What the fuck do you know? You think you know shit—well, excuse-fucking-me, you don’t know shit.”
“I can’t do it,” he said, easily. “I can’t withdraw ten thousand dollars from a bank account just like that—and not have Marilyn know. And I’m not going to, anyway.”
“My son’s going to be dead if I can’t come up with this money.” No tears now. Her breath came in little bursts.
“You understand I had no idea you had a son.” “Well, of course I didn’t tell you.” “But why not?” His question was genuine, puzzled.
he couldn’t get away, so they had continued at the motel and he gave her the extra money, and then they fell in love—he had loved her, really, from the start, and she said she had fallen in love with him too, and told him her name was Tracy, while she sat fully clothed, right in that chair. And that was how it had been for seven months now: desperately in love. Charlie did not like desperate.
“I thought you had the character to help me out.”
He sat down on the bed and laughed and laughed.
“Character,” he added. “I miss it.”
That anxiety was wired, or became wired after events of trauma, that one was not strong or weak, only made a certain way— Yes, he missed character! The nobility of it. Why, it was like being forced to give up religion once you’d been confronted with its base and primitive aspects, like having to view the Catholic Church with its nest of pedophilia and endless cover-ups and popes that worked with Hitler or Mussolini—Charlie
Character! Who ever used that word anymore?
because watching her he saw nothing—not one thing—that could have caused him to feel as he did; still desiring her, he found the sight of her puzzling.
Except for the baptism of his grandchildren, and the funeral of Patty Nicely’s husband, Charlie had not been in a church for years.
I hear from you again, I’ll track you down and kill you myself,”
“Whether your name is Tracy or Lacy or Shitty or Pretty. Get it? Because you will need more.”
instinct told him that this was a good place to be when the real blow arrived;
In a distant way he understood that she had her own echoes of pain—at their age, he supposed, who did not?
You never get used to pain, no matter what anyone says about it.
people who no longer felt pain at all. He had seen it in other men—the blankness behind the eyes, the lack that then defined them.
Angelina because Mary knew during her pregnancy that she was carrying a little angel. Mary sat up straight and looked at the girl,
Later she realized he was just not in love with her. And at the fiftieth wedding anniversary party the girls threw them, he did not ask her to dance either.
You could not live with someone for fifty years and not worry about him. And miss him.
You’re in love with your mother, Angie, you’re not in love with me. And so she had come here to see her mother now, to tell her about her marriage: this woman—her mother—that she was in love with.
He really was a mean snake of a man (but he was her father, and she loved him),
If her father was sick again, really and truly going to die this time, he’d somehow get himself to this village, find this nothing of a Paolo, and shoot him in public and then shoot himself.
The child could have been twelve years old, sulking, yet Angelina had never been a sulker.
“Did I ever tell you that when the doctor handed you to me, I recognized you?”
looked at you, and it was the strangest thing, Angelina, because I thought, Oh, it’s you. It didn’t even seem surprising. It felt like the most natural thing in the world, but I recognized you, honey. I don’t understand why I recognized you, but I did.”
(She did not say, and only fleetingly did she think: And you have always taken up so much space in my heart that it has sometimes felt to be a burden.)
Well, it turns out he’d been seeing a prostitute in Peoria, all the while telling his wife that he was going to a veterans’ support group
Well, apparently he gave this prostitute ten thousand dollars and his wife found out and she kicked him out.”
“Patty Nicely!” “No.” “Yes! Okay, Patty won’t come right out and tell me, but she’s lost weight, did I tell you she’d gained weight and the kids at school call her Fatty Patty?
It was as if the wine had turned on her; she felt that cold toward her mother, suddenly.
that her daughter would never forgive her for leaving her father. Not in Mary’s lifetime. And Mary’s lifetime was not very long anymore. But the knowledge was terrible—and yet in Mary’s head was that twang again, she was angry—!
She could not tell her—this child she loved as much as she had loved anything—that she did not dread her death, that she was almost ready for it, not really but getting there, and it was horrifying to realize that—that life had worn her out, worn her down, she was almost ready to die, and she would die, probably not too long from now.
“I mean, the other woman was you, Mom. I couldn’t get over your leaving. I couldn’t stop talking about you. And Jack said I was in love with my mother.”
She didn’t think they were sexy at all.
Not one thing lasts forever; still, may Angelina have this moment for the rest of her life.
Mary had not had a cigarette since she’d moved here. She had told the man in the shop that the cigarettes were for her daughter.
Her father, from the doorway, would say, ’Night, Lina, go to sleep. Now Angelina gazed through the window at the sea; it was dark, the ships had their lights on.
She will die, this place will depress her so much. He really didn’t know what to do.
“The janitor at school. What a nice man he was.”
“So, like, we’re going to die soon and you thought you should come say goodbye?” Vicky asked this, looking directly at her sister. “You look dressed for a funeral, by the way.”
I know you give me money, and you never have to give me another cent,
I came over here to see you today to tell you: You make me sick.”
almost bluish.
“I just know when I have to eat because I start to feel funny in the head.”
I don’t remember you guys having to eat out of the toilet,
