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Lila realizes suddenly how rare it is for her to hear a man discuss love in open, simple terms.
‘Keep going. No feeling is final.’ Something along those lines. And I always think of that, when things are a bit rough. No feeling is final. The shitty times don’t last forever. Even if they feel like
Your nan is nice.” “I’m
“Because it’s only hurt people who hurt people.”
“Celie, baby, you look around at people who are happy in themselves in their lives—they’re just busy living, having a good time. They don’t set out to be mean to other people. Their energy is going into other things. It doesn’t even occur to them to hurt someone else, or to try to make them feel small. In fact, they’re more likely to be building other people up. So you know what you’re going to do?”
a strange harmony has settled over her ramshackle, mismatched house, and after the past few years she more than anyone knows just to accept and enjoy these moments when they come.
Lila absorbs what Eleanor said and thinks, Yes, maybe this is a family. With all its mad history and chaos, heartbreaks, stupid jokes, ridiculous triumphs, and distinct lack of Noguchi coffee-tables, maybe this is my family.
Her own garden is finished, the last of the plants dug in and watered, and for the last week she has sat out here every evening, Truant at her feet, just enjoying the space and the peace. It is as if she has been given a whole extra room in her house, a place where she can feel quite different, a place without a complicated history.
But Francesca McKenzie was nothing if not a positive thinker. In those final hours in Dublin she told herself that sometimes it was necessary to make a mistake to persuade yourself of what was right and important.
This is life at this age, she muses, a million goodbyes, and you never know which are the final ones. You just absorb them, like little shocks, trusting with each one that you’ll be able to keep moving
forward.
She lets herself rest against him, holding him as tightly as he is holding her, wondering at the fact that finally, thirty-five years late, she may have been able to rely on her father more than she had realized.
She shakes her head. “And tonight I looked at him and I thought maybe we broke our family. Because we had long stopped trying with each other. Or we stopped being curious about each other. We stopped being kind to each other. Or maybe we were two people who were never really a great match in the first place.”