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neither of them had found themselves on a path in life where buying a Cadillac was ever going to be likely. She couldn’t blame him, because she was sure that to him it felt like his last chance to try.
A jukebox was playing that nice Otis Redding song, the one about the dock of the bay.
Hahaha
Edith would just as soon take another woman’s husband as another woman’s pie recipe, and she had the best husband in the world, so there you go.
She leaned her sweaty head against the wall of the shed and felt the beer hit her tongue. Whoa, she thought.
No wonder the older girls she knew had such a twisted and cautious relationship with beer; it was often only available to them in moments of social or sexual anxiety.
These kids were her best friends, and they made her feel like the loneliest girl in the universe.
Helen had always taken pride in what restraint and forethought she possessed.
The pail and bottles were gone, and there was a pitcher of water, a glass, and an aspirin on a napkin.
There wasn’t a widely understood term yet for the way Moritz and Petunia lived, but it was clear they hadn’t thrown anything away in decades.
The first time she had sex, it was cold, and strange, and sad. The first time she had sex, it was to say good-bye.
Her mom carefully selected her memories to reflect her established opinions, and it turned her mind into a bowl of lettuce she believed was a salad.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know your parents assume I’m from this rich family. I don’t want to intimidate them.”
Omg
He looked down at his empty plate. “I understand free beer.”
Having done that once, she hoped she could do it again.
It would be a hard act to follow, but everything should be.
Her new colleagues were younger, more serious, and faster-moving than her kitchen staff in New Stockholm, and in spite of those traits, she liked them all.
“This is all I ever wanted, my whole life,” he finally said, dipping a soup spoon into a fat bowl of the little gravy-engorged dumplings. He had the brilliant ease of a heavyweight champion on vacation, or a sea bird riding on a boat. “They always made me eat meat and vegetables. Every time, growing up. But I just wanted a bowl of spaetzle and gravy. Just that.”
Just then, she understood a little bit of where he was, and the difference between a brain and a mind, and whatever his brain was or had become, however the failings of its architecture, his mind was moving, exiled and tireless, and she could feel
When people asked, How are you?, sometimes, for a while, she’d say, Well, I miss him, and leave it at that.
God needed an indestructible person for the tasks that lay ahead, and this is how they’re forged.
After a while, people confused her quiet, sublimated grief with a Protestant work ethic.
Diana didn’t want school to be more challenging. If this was what being smart was like, it was clearly overrated.
The most-obeyed parents are probably the dead ones, if they were loved.
vanish into the glimmering snow. She was a little startled that he’d just left like that. Then again, he had tried to reach out to her, earnestly, and she’d pushed him away.
“That’s the second time I gave her life,” Jan was quoted as saying in the paper, and Tricia dressed and carried herself like she’d resented every breath on earth since.
Helen knew right then that her aspirations would have a mortal enemy, right there under the same roof. She couldn’t ever trust her mother with her honest desires again, and would regret it the few times she did.
He claimed to have spent one hour in 1948 trying to think like a banker and he said it was the closest he’d come to suicide.
And now, here she was, falling madly in love, eight years into her marriage.
In fall 1975, with the economy lurching like a sick carnival pony, multiple women trying to kill the president, and the country whipped by inflation, a lot of people were worried about money.
You look like a lawyer who represents drummers.”
“No, just married to one. I run a brewery. Heartlander Brewing. You’ve heard of us?”
!!!
and if she was going to feel lonely, she might as well be by herself.
They had come close before—he’d even taken the condoms from his wallet twice—but they’d never done it, because she’d told Paul she was waiting. For what?, he’d asked her at the time, and she wasn’t sure yet, but she didn’t owe him an explanation, besides that she was.
Sometimes she looked at people like Marvin and wished she never wanted anything besides what was freely given.
Her parents never grew weary of their work in the way she had, not that she was complaining about Arby’s or Kohl’s.
but her power was that she’d always acted like she had the exact body she was supposed to have, at every age, like most men did. She
“He actually proved me right. It wasn’t just that I worked hard.”
Diana believed that you could be both grateful and miserable, but no one seemed to agree with her.
Then she wondered why God would even say such a thing.
“I would’ve never said that.” Mo shook his head. “There’s a whole ocean of bad beer out there, trust me.”
Preach brother
Diana seemed to believe that not every wrong against you is forgivable and not everyone should be forgiven. It frightened
If that’s what a person calls “better,” then fine. But that wasn’t the point. There was a lot more to beer besides objective standards of quality. “I tried all those other ones for ya,
