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she didn’t ever see the point of bellyaching about the things she couldn’t change, especially in a world that never once ran a want ad looking for a complainer.
she would’ve felt the most important things a Minnesotan, woman or man, can feel at the end of their lives. She’d done what she could, and she was of use. She helped.
Edith had flipped through an issue once, twenty years ago, and thought it was kind of different, so she never read it again.
When you see a man falling off a ladder above you, Edith believed, you don’t envision your arms breaking. You just hold them out.
They used to live next door to a fireman who said that he prayed every night for tomorrow to be boring, and she knew exactly how he felt.
These kids were her best friends, and they made her feel like the loneliest girl in the universe.
he revealed a single bottle of Hamm’s in his coat pocket. “I couldn’t find flowers,” he said.
“Ha,” Chesley said, wiping the pumpkin pie crumbs from his face. “This is illegal.”
Her grief was a forest with no trails, and she couldn’t guess how long her heart would walk through it, as her body walked other places.
When people asked, How are you?, sometimes, for a while, she’d say, Well, I miss him, and leave it at that.
“Memorizing facts isn’t a sign of intelligence,” Mr. Arden said. “You know that you don’t know things, and want to find out. That’s what smart is, not a talent for regurgitation.”
He wanted what she wanted, and the moments when he helped enable their shared dreams is when she felt, finally, the kind of love everyone on the radio sang about.
What a dick move on his part, to go and be astoundingly kind like that,
“I want to call him back right now,” Diana said. Mo grabbed Diana’s arm. “No. I’ll throw your phone out the window. Leave him alone.”
she wanted a family. And for the dumbest, most obvious reason, too. To replace the one that was gone.
God must like our family, she used to tell people, because He sure can’t wait for us to join Him.
Edith liked the idea of a place that let a person be completely in the way, hassle-free, whenever one felt like it.
death doesn’t happen all at once. The public death is just the beginning, and the rest takes as long as it has to, in private bits and pieces, without any warning, schedule, or validation. A pen they once held, now out of ink. A bag of their favorite chips, past its expiration date.
There were even two different seven-layer taco dips, because not everybody likes olives.
the nicest thing you can do for someone is be happy to see them,
