Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

‘You have to have something on the line, for it to be called character.’ ”

A world of vegetarians cooking meatloaf.

Because the world had decided that to be soft was to be weak, even though in Joan’s experience being soft and flexible was always more durable than being hard and brittle. Admitting you were afraid always took more guts than pretending you weren’t. Being willing to make a mistake got you further than never trying. The world had decided that to be fallible was weak. But we are all fallible. The strong ones are the ones who accept it.

Joan had long known that if you’re unhappy, it’s hard to watch other people be happy. So it stood to reason that the opposite was true, too. That if you were happy, you wanted others to be happy alongside you. This was the only reason Joan could think of for why Barbara suddenly seemed so immensely proud of her.

The right to exist and to love and be proud and happy. The right to live.

She could not imagine this, being raised without a father. She had asked her father if he had missed him. And her father had said, “You can’t miss something you never had.” It had sounded good at the time. It had a finality to it that she had liked.