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He was nineteen, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light.
He had not been forgiven and neither are you.
Some things belong to those who lived them.”
It will only occur to Hai, years later, when his grandmother is long dead, how easy it was for them to laugh, that it was almost a superpower, to crack up with faces so open they seemed on the verge of falling apart, and to do so without a touch of shame in a parking lot on the side of a highway in August with only a half gallon of gas in the Toyota, their bellies filled with french fries and chicken tenders and Dr Pepper, which they mistook for Coca-Cola but drank anyway, grimacing, the taste too close to a particular brand of cough syrup from the country they fled.
You’re just raining right now.
“To be alive and try to be a decent person, and not turn it into anything big or grand, that’s the hardest thing of all.
“The one that comes from a microwave left open in a dark room.”
“Sometimes I want to think about being good. But it doesn’t choose me. It just doesn’t. I’m no good at goodness.”
“With him,” he said, “it wasn’t that I was happy—but that I was okay. And okay was even better than happy because I thought it had a better chance of lasting.”
Somebody goes ahead and dies and all of a sudden you become a box for them, he thought, you store these things that no one has ever seen and you go on living like that, your head a coffin to keep memories of the dead alive. But what do you do with that kind of box? Where do you put it down?
