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Theirs was a mixed-race marriage—between a Norwegian and a Dane—and thus all things culturally important to one but not the other were given a free pass and critiqued only in unmixed company.
Even though she had an overbite and the shakes, she was six feet tall and beautiful, and not like a statue or a perfume advertisement, but in a realistic way, like how a truck or a pizza is beautiful at the moment you want it most.
Eva Louise Thorvald was born two weeks before her due date, on June 2, 1989, coming into the world at an assertive ten pounds, two ounces. When Lars first held her, his heart melted over her like butter on warm bread, and he would never get it back. When mother and baby were asleep in the hospital room, he went out to the parking lot, sat in his Dodge Omni, and cried like a man who had never wanted anything in his life until now.
He tried to impress upon Cynthia the fact that having multiple kids means at least one of them will stick around to make sure that you don’t die alone if you fall in the shower or trip on your basement staircase. He pointed out how after he and Jarl had gotten out of Duluth, their little brother, Sigmund, had taken over both the bakery and the extraordinary demands of their dying parents, and how that was working out super for everybody.
Ha!
Yes, he just wanted her to want to be a mom, in the same way that he felt, with all of his blood, that he was a dad first, and everything else in the world an obscure, unfathomably distant second.
what concerned Lars more was the box of macaroni and cheese. It had been a pretty darn brisk slide from their first store-bought pasta to their first processed dairy,
Eva looked up at him, pinching her eyelids against the bright sky, but making happy eye contact with him that seemed to say, I love Dad, or maybe, I just took the runniest shit my father will ever see. In direct sunlight, it was hard to tell.
already thinking about the good and the bad and the deep human necessity of it all, and how anybody ever got anything done without family, and how someone could give that up in the amount of time it takes to seal an envelope, with the same saliva once used to seal a marriage.
She hated those boys and knew that they were stupid and hence their opinions were baseless and the impact of their lives on the planet would be measured only in undifferentiated emissions of methane and nitrates . . . but still. It hurt, and it hurt that it hurt,
They were each outcasts in their own way, and even though he was way more fearless and tough than she’d ever be, he looked after her, and she knew nothing bad would ever happen to her if he was around.
He suddenly looked sad and bewildered, like an elephant that had been fired from the circus and was wandering down the side of the highway with nowhere to go.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing—John F. Kennedy,’”
She now looked older, like a woman, a woman whose hand he could take and stride into the darkness with, because she was a woman whose darkness matched his own, and they could fix each other without even trying. They wouldn’t even have to talk about it.
He’d read that being in an adult relationship means having a willingness to change. Knowing when you’re wrong and owning up to it—that’s the definition of being a man. He was thrilled for the opportunity to mature before her eyes like this.
“People need people,” Eva said.
Lacey was a glow of color and happiness that no one besides her husband ever wanted. She was upbeat and harmless as an educational toy, and it was never insincere—in fact, she was a one-woman plague of sincerity, the Patient Zero of earnest zeal. Though one could imagine it might have helped her career as a waitress, in social situations her personality made you hate the world and hate life.
Dang, poor Lacey. She sounds lovely to me.
2½ cups crushed graham cracker crumbs 1 cup melted Grade A butter 1 cup peanut butter 2½ cups powdered sugar 1 cup milk chocolate chips with 1 teaspoon Grade A butter Mix together the graham cracker crumbs, melted butter, peanut butter, and sugar. Pat into a greased 9-by-13-inch pan. Melt the chips and butter and spread them on top of the bars. Set in the refrigerator until firm. Cut into bars.
“Well, you can’t control other people, but you can control how you react to them,”
God did not make her a vengeful person; God made her a giving person, and even in this house of people who could be so hateful and hard, her one skill, she knew, was to serve them and make them happy, the way even an unwatered tree still provides whatever shade it can.
She was not raised to confront people or defend herself in a confrontation; she was raised to appease, to mollify, to calm, to tuck little monsters in at night, to apologize for things she screwed up without realizing, to forgive, to sweeten, and her bars, her bars did that for the world, they were her I’m Sorry, they were her Like Me, they were her Love Freely Given.
