More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
She felt suddenly fond of her unremarkable life, that humdrum necklace of imitation pearls with the occasional glint of the real thing.
“You,” she said when she found him on her doorstep. She looked up the street. “How is it you don’t own a car?” “I sold it,” he said. “I needed the cash.” He didn’t care how this sounded; at her age she’d probably heard everything. “For what? Alcohol?” “A conscience debt.” Why was he telling her this? “It didn’t work. Isn’t working.” “Money rarely does.” She said nothing more.
He grabbed his hair with both hands. “Two times in the book! Two times immortal!” Once again she had this strange, lovely boy hopping in glee. Right in her kitchen. Where glee had not been in residence since Louise’s passing. Glee, in the form of this boy who might single-handedly will her to live another two decades.
“Wound me,” he said, and this she was willing to do. She pitched herself into his arms, her cries soft and sloppy and heart-crushing.
Oh. Yes. It was. It was awful to hear about Maud-Lucy. She’d been invisible to me for decades, but the news—well, it rang all these chimes. Bing bong bang, all these hurt places clanging to life.
And oh, weren’t they a show: their puzzling wants, their cross-purposes, their own mundane, ticking-down minutes.
Quinn observed her for a moment. “I can’t figure out how he hooked you on this records kick.” He drained his coffee. “You got reeled all the way in.” “One,” she said, “it’s not a kick. Two, he reeled me in with enthusiasm.”
He was committing to the crushed remnants of the woman he loved,
“She won’t regret me, Quinn, I promise.”
As she was leaving my apartment she turned around and said, “How long, Ona Vitkus, have you been in love?” Her arms came around me. She smelled like violets even in that freezing night air. “He’s your secret valentine,” she said. “But Ona, dear, are you his?”
Sorry, I forgot you again. You know, one meets so many people, the years pass and pass, but there are certain times, certain people— . . . They take up room. So much room. I was married to Howard for twenty-eight years and yet he made only a piddling dent in my memory. A little nick. But certain others, they move in and make themselves at home and start flapping their arms in the story you make of your life. They have a wingspan. . . .
Convince is for thought; persuade is for action. You couldn’t convince me that taping my horrible old-lady voice was a good idea, but you persuaded me to do it anyway, didn’t you, you little dickens?
These foolish things always happen in winter, when people are so sun-starved they don’t know up from down.
My apartment smelled like baking, which in winter is a marvelous thing.
He silently thanked the God he didn’t believe in for the near misses in his own life, the ones he would never know about because the one in a million was never him.
“I talked to Sal,” Quinn said. “We’re back, next Sunday, just like always.” “No way!” Rennie smiled all the way up to his eyeballs. “No freakin’ way! Did you tell the guys?” “You get the pleasure.” “I’ll call them,” Rennie said. Twenty years slid from his face. “Right now. I’ll call everybody.”
She gained a sense of urgency, aware of magic afoot—magic to be scooped up quick before it vanished.
He will ask this of his father, who will say to himself: You can’t make a simple D chord, how do you know about changing keys? I listened, he’ll answer, and his father will realize how ardently he’d paid attention all along, how carefully he observed, how hard he tried. He will tell his father that the morning chorus sounded like something rising out of the breath it took away. To which his father will respond, All right, then, my friend; let’s make some music.
