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Louise: I just haven’t seen you like this in a while. I’m used to seeing you more sedate. Thelma: Well, I’ve had it up to my ass with sedate. —Thelma & Louise
“OK, OK,” he said, and Jules pictured him holding his hands up as if to tell her to calm down in the same condescending manner her ex-husband used to. If there was anything worse in life than a man telling you to calm down when you were upset, she didn’t know what it was.
“Why is it called a grandfather clock and not a grandmother clock?” her eldest granddaughter, Poppy, asked once. “Because only a man would find the need to announce it every time he performed his job as required,” Louise replied.
She’d learned long ago not to fight it, to make space for it, the way one might for a new tchotchke on the shelf, a souvenir from a trip you didn’t want to forget. That was all grief was, really, Louise had determined—remembering.
who won’t drink in company is either a thief or a spy.” Louise raised an eyebrow. It was something Tanner had dealt with often at Northwestern—not the question of whether she was a thief or a spy, but the need to explain herself to her peers who immediately judged her as a teetotaler, a prude.
“Nothing in life goes according to plan. Nothing. And the sooner you accept that, the better off you’ll be.”
She was so young. She had no idea how long life was. People always said life was short, but it wasn’t. Not really. You could cram so many different lives into one. Be so many different people.
She closed her eyes, wishing her mom were there. Why was that? No matter how much she hated her at times, it was instinctual, this yearning for her mom’s care. The way she would put a cool cloth on her brow when she was sick. Bring her flat Sprite. Rub her back until she fell asleep.
Louise pretended she didn’t hear his voice break on the word lovely. She knew he was thinking of his wife. She also knew it wouldn’t do to ask about her. Or try to comfort him with words. When it came to grief, words, she found, were always lacking.
She took a deep breath, and then said in an even smaller voice, “I think I’m broken. Like I don’t even know how to be a person anymore. How to be . . . anything.” Like water circling the drain, her words crept close to the truth, but she couldn’t bring herself to say her biggest fear aloud: that she had been so awful to everyone in her life—what she had done to Vee, how she had been treating her mom and the rest of her family—she thought maybe she was actually a bad person. Deep down where it mattered. And that she deserved to be lonely. To be alone.
“For what it’s worth,” Mrs. Wilt said, “I don’t think you’re broken.” Tanner felt her eyes sting once again, her nose tingle. “You don’t?” “No,” she said. “You’re just human like the rest of us.” Tanner let out a slow and quiet exhale as Mrs. Wilt said softly, mostly under her breath, “Aren’t we a pair?” It was a throwaway line, Tanner knew. Something people just said. But she clung on to the we like a drowning person to a life vest, taking solace in how it made her feel—like maybe she wasn’t so alone after all.
“I don’t know,” Louise said. “Sometimes it just feels like we still spend so much time trying to teach the house not to catch on fire, instead of teaching the arsonist not to light it.”
“Well, at least we found something you’re good at.” “What, gun handling?” Tanner asked, still laughing. Mrs. Wilt cackled. “God, no. Salvatore’s lucky you couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn,” she said, which made Tanner laugh even harder. When they caught their breath, Tanner crinkled her brow. “Then what am I good at?” Mrs. Wilt took a long pull from a plastic water bottle and re-capped it. Then she glanced at Tanner and said purposefully, “Being a friend.”
But Tanner, of course, like most daughters, would make many more choices throughout her life that Candace would likely not agree with, causing a fair amount of stress and anxiety, which her mother would then naturally reabsorb and view as her own shortcoming somehow.
In life, there were two kinds of friends: friends who would wish you well on your journey to battle, and friends who would jump in the trenches with you. The latter were much more difficult to come by, but George belonged in that group.
