Anything Is Possible (Amgash #2)

by Elizabeth Strout

To listen to a person is not passive. To really listen is active, and Dottie had really listened.

Abel had entered a period in life in which he acknowledged that the Christmas season tended to make people irritable, yet his own sense of Christmas—lit trees and happy children and stockings that sagged from the mantel—he could not seem to give up.