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I have always maintained that, ultimately, the places we love are about people.
The good news is that St. John is ready for you to come back or visit for the first time. It’s still paradise, all the more beautiful because of what it has endured.
“The CIA should hire women in their fifties,” Lydia says. “We’re invisible.”
Those two are typical parents; they tell each other everything.
It’s amazing how much dogs understand.
LeeAnn believed that everything happens for a reason, a theory that Huck only half agrees with, because some moments in this life seem random and senseless.
Why would he pay someone else to care for their child when he could do it himself?
Smiles are what pass for kisses these days.
In her world, each dawning day is merely another chance to eat pizza.
What kind of mother doesn’t love her own child? That may be too harsh. Certainly Anna loves Floyd. But does she like him? Does she enjoy one single thing about being a parent?
Does she ever get tired of disappointing people? Baker wonders.
One thing about a close-knit community like St. John: no one endures a tragedy alone. Ayers had experienced the celebration of LeeAnn Powers’s life five years earlier; she hadn’t realized until then that dying could be beautiful and filled with love.
when human words and emotions fail, animals still provide comfort.
Maybe Paulette takes this landscape for granted, but for Cash it’s like discovering another planet.
Huck would name burying LeeAnn as the hardest thing he’d ever had to do, but only because he had loved the woman so damn much.
The men in LeeAnn’s family were either weak or absent. It was the women who were strong.
You want an honest business? Go out on a boat, catch a fish, and eat it for dinner.
She doesn’t need someone to worship her. She needs someone to love her, clothe her, feed her, teach her right from wrong, someone to set limits and provide opportunities, someone to believe in her and be her champion. And that person will be Huck. He will be her Unconditional. He will be her No Matter What.
She was a strong woman. She should be falling apart, but instead she had made a list.
She looks like hope.
He had told her he loved her so often, she had stopped hearing it.
Irene had grown to know Russ the only way it could be done—by putting in the time.
There are so many thoughts that pierce her, not least of which is her own blindness, her own myopia, her own pathetic, middle-class, middle America view that marriages are meant to last forever, through the bad times, through the boring times.
One thing Irene has learned in her fifty-seven years is that no matter how hideous something seems at first, with the passing of time comes habituation and then acceptance. What Irene is living through now is abhorrent. But the world is filled with deceptions and betrayals—nearly every life has one—and yet the sun still rises and sets, the world continues on.
I will forgive them, Irene thinks. I will make myself forgive them if it’s the last thing I do.
There’s no point staying home to wallow, Maia said, sounding a lot older than twelve.
It’s a cruel trick of the world, a person alive and well one minute, thinking harm will never come her way, and then dead the next.
It makes no sense that Cash—who doesn’t have an ambitious or competitive bone in his body, who skis for a living—is so high-strung emotionally, while Baker, who thrives on pressure and tension, tends to be pretty sanguine no matter what.
Maybe it’s simply one of the unsolved mysteries of human nature: how two siblings, born of the same parents and raised in the same house, can be complete opposites.
His mother is, in today’s parlance, a badass.
That they had enjoyed such a cathartic and successful outing and that this dinner had evolved from that says… what? That misery loves company, she supposes. That they are not enemies but rather casualties of the same sordid circumstances.
she exudes both confidence and competence. Irene cherishes competence in everyone, even Mavis Key.
LinkedIn, Mavis murmurs. Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook. This is a world Irene has actively resisted.
It’s hard to pierce her armor, to get any kind of human response out of her at all. Now, in her defense, she deals with life and death all day, every day, so telling her about finger-painting projects or playground squabbles falls on deaf ears.”
But I treasure all the little stuff. Because then they get older and they stop telling you things.”
“Always best to be open,”
She and her momma used to fight like half-starved hens over a handful of feed, but there was a deep emotional attachment.
Rosie met the Invisible Man right after LeAnn died—five years ago.
half the fun of seeing something so breathtaking is letting other people know you’ve seen it
The music is happy, undemanding, and full of sunshine.
It’s newly astonishing to Irene that as much as we know about the world, we still can’t see into another person’s mind or heart.
His ardor for Irene had been on grand display, and Irene wondered how her emotionally reserved parents would view a man who was so outspoken about his feelings.
It’s not necessarily the creature comforts themselves, it’s that someone thinks you deserve them.
The question comes out as accusatory, just as Cash feared it might, but Anna wears a heavy suit of armor, so Irene’s tone bounces right off of her.
Maybe she’s not the most maternal presence, but Cash still finds his sister-in-law impressive. He notices her posture as she goes to greet the owners, trailing her roller bag behind her, the picture of extreme self-confidence, uncompromising in her principles.
Huck is proud of her. She is brave and fierce and incorruptible. Huck can’t believe he thought that either he or Irene Steele or her sons could ruin Maia Small. No matter what happens with all of this, Huck thinks, Maia is going to be fine.
Baker, although not surprised—he’s been wondering if his mother would break, if she would finally act like a woman who has tragically lost her husband instead of a woman moving around in an extended state of shock—doesn’t know what to do.
“Can you imagine? I was embarrassed because your father loved me too much. Because I wasn’t raised like that. My parents told me they loved me… once a year, maybe, and I never heard them say it to each other. Never once! But they did love each other… they just showed the love in their actions, the way they treated each other… honor, respect. They didn’t keep secrets like this one!”
Had it all been an act, then? Baker wonders. Or had the three of them done such a pitiful job of returning Russ’s love that he’d sought affection elsewhere?
It’s a sobering, nearly ghastly, thought: You live a whole life, filled with routines, traditions, and brand-new experiences, and then you end up like this. Baker can’t let his mind wander to the mechanics of cremation—your body, which you have fed and exercised and washed and dressed with such care, is pushed into a fiery inferno. Baker shudders. And yet there is no escaping death. No escaping it! Every single one of us will die, as surely as every single one of us has been born. Baker is here today, but one day he will be like Russ. Gone.
