Three Days in June

by Anne Tyler

Everything Sophie said, as a rule, was about three degrees too vivacious. It seemed that she lived on some other level than ours, someplace louder and more brightly lit.

We’d be getting along just fine and then he’d say something that reminded me he was this totally other, totally opposite kind of person from me.

Anger feels so much better than sadness. Cleaner, somehow, and more definite. But then when the anger fades, the sadness comes right back again the same as ever.

I mean, good grief! Do you keep an itemized list of things to worry about? How do you remember them all?”

He had a tendency to wander off course halfway through a project, as if his life were just a casual experiment.

That’s something you forget when you’ve been on your own awhile: those married-couple conversations that continue intermittently for weeks, sometimes, branching out and doubling back and looping into earlier strands like a piece of crochet work.

How come there weren’t any grownups around? Why did everyone just assume I knew what I was doing?