Commonwealth

by Ann Patchett

DAs were the guys who smoked your cigarettes because they were trying to quit.

Fix was starting to see that this was the way life worked once you got older and the kids came; there wasn’t as much time as you thought there was going to be.

He realized then what he had known from the first minute he saw her, from when she leaned out the kitchen door and called for her husband. This was the start of his life.

The two sisters were connected by neither love nor mutual affinity but by a very small bathroom that could be entered from the bedroom on either side.

When the six of them were together they looked more like a day camp than a family, random children dropped off on the same curb.

His face was a caricature of his face, a face that was meant to be sketched beside a book review in The New Yorker.

“Did you ever want to be a writer?” “No,” she said, and she would have told him. “I only wanted to be a reader.”