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When I was a kid I didn’t take my mom seriously. She was a housewife who was in a book club, and she and her friends were always running errands, and driving car pool, and forcing us to follow rules that didn’t make sense. They just seemed like a bunch of lightweights. Today I realize how many things they were dealing with that I was totally unaware of. They took the hits so we could skate by obliviously, because that’s the deal: as a parent, you endure pain so your children don’t have to.
Housewife (n)—a light, worthless woman or girl —Oxford English Dictionary, compact edition, 1971
The only books they give us are cookbooks because in their minds we are silly, lightweight know-nothings. And you’ve just proven them right.”
It took Patricia aback. This was one of those trashy true crime books. But clearly Kitty was reading it and you couldn’t call someone else’s taste in books trashy, even if it was.
Patricia felt like it was deeply unfair when all she’d tried to do was be a good mother and somehow that made her the Wicked Witch of the West.
Sometimes she craved a little danger. And that was why she had book club.
they were all in this together, and if their husbands ever took out a life insurance policy on them they were in trouble.
“Being a teenager isn’t a number,” Maryellen said. “It’s the age when you stop liking them.” “You don’t like the girls?” Patricia asked. “No one likes their children,” Maryellen said. “We love them to death, but we don’t like them.”
Pick your battles. No one’s going to die if they don’t eat every meal at the table or if they don’t have clean underwear one day.”
“The Bible is hardly the best source for legal strategy,” Maryellen said.
“There’s an owl,” Miss Mary croaked. “I don’t see any owls,” Patricia said. “You should get some rest.”
It was probably the painkillers, but that made her cry even harder.
Well, she thought, if that’s the effect trying to become chief of psychiatry has on him, I’m all for it.
She refused to let anyone eat from the peach tree in her backyard no matter how good the fruit looked because she said it had been planted in sadness and the fruit tasted bitter.
“Patricia?” Grace said. “Grace Cavanaugh. How are you feeling?” For some reason, Grace always introduced herself at the beginning of each phone call.
“I am not sure what the appropriate gesture is to make toward the family of the woman who bit off your ear, but if you felt absolutely compelled, I certainly wouldn’t take food.” Maryellen called on Saturday and
Every time she looked up and saw Miss Mary standing in a doorway, dressed to go out, purse over one arm, staring at her silently, not seeming to know what came next, she felt like it was only a few short steps from there to squatting in the side yard stuffing raw raccoon meat into her mouth.
“Hoyt Pickens came by last night,” she said.
Francine was older, with a face like a dried apple, and not many people still hired her in the Old Village because she had a vinegary nature.
“The only people who don’t apologize are psychopaths.”
He regarded her for a split second, expressionless, sizing her up, and then he matched her smile. “Only if it’s a real invitation,” he said. “Consider yourself invited,” she said, standing aside. After a moment he stepped over her threshold and into the dark front hall.
while staring hard at
“A reader lives many lives,” James Harris said. “The person who doesn’t read lives but one. But if you’re happy just doing what you’re told and reading what other people think you should read, then don’t let me stop you. I just find it sad.”
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“You thought no one would recognize you,” Miss Mary said. “But I’ve got your photograph, Hoyt.”
“Hoyt Pickens,”
It would probably prove to be small and anticlimactic, but she was so starved for excitement she’d take any mystery she could.
An image of Ted Bundy with his arm in a fake cast asking Brenda Ball to help him carry his books to his car flashed across Patricia’s mind. She dismissed it as undignified.
That was what Carter always said when she asked for her own bank account: this money belonged to both of them. She was a grown woman and could use it however she saw fit, even if it was to help another man.
THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY June 1993
“Who is clearly a serial killer,” Kitty said, keeping her eyes on James Harris.
These men find a vulnerable woman and arrange an ‘accidental’ meeting and they’re so smooth and seductive that she invites him into her home. But when he visits he’s very careful no one sees where he parks his truck. Then he takes her upstairs and does things to her for days.”
She remembered fallow fields and abandoned farms. She understood the appeal of something fresh, and clean, and green to people who lived in a small, hot place like that.
daddy. Next to him stood Hoyt Pickens and his ice cream suit glowed in the dark.
“The men got shovels, and they dug a deep hole underneath the peach tree and dragged Leon to it and he must not have been dead because I heard him call my daddy ‘boss’ and say, ‘Please, boss, I’ll play you something, boss,’ and they threw him down in that hole and piled dirt on top of him until his begging got muffled, and after a while you couldn’t hear it anymore, but I still could.
“Nightwalking men always have a hunger on them,” she croaked. “They never stop taking and they don’t know about enough. They mortgaged their souls away and now they eat and eat and never know how to stop.”
THE STRANGER BESIDE ME July 1993
where all these damn marsh rats were coming from.
That childhood nightmare came screaming at her as the huge black rat on the steps went from stone still to a black blur, leaping off the stairs, racing at Miss Mary across the empty carpet, moving so fast she screamed.
Control? She knew what to do if too many people showed up for supper, or if someone arrived early for a party, but what did you do when rats attacked your mother-in-law? Who told you how to cope with that?
For years, his mother had told him he was the smartest and most special boy in the world and he’d believed her. Having her die like this, in his house, in a way he couldn’t even really explain to people, was a kind of failure he’d never experienced before.
“I’m sure there are some very nice people who live out here,” Kitty said. “But have you heard of super-predators? They’re gangs who drive real slow at night and flash their headlights and if you flash back they follow you to your house and shoot you in the head.”
Boo Daddy, Boo Daddy In the woods Grabbed a little boy ’Cause he taste so good Boo Daddy, Boo Daddy In the sheets Sucking all your blood ’Cause it taste so sweet
Boo Daddy, Boo Daddy One, two, three Sneaking in my window And sucking on me.
“You heard those Nancy girls chanting out there. There’s something in the wood’s been taking our babies.”
Besides, one little boy has an accident, an old lady runs away with some man, the police figure it’s just colored people being colored. It’d be like reporting on a fish for being wet. The only one that looks unnatural is what happened to that other boy, Orville Reed’s cousin, Sean.”
“He killed her grass parking on it like that,” Grace said, after she read the entry. “Her lawn is never going to recover.”
“Isn’t that how every serial killer gets away with it for so long?” Patricia asked. “Everyone ignores the little things and Ted Bundy keeps killing women until finally someone does what they should have done in the first place and connects the little things that didn’t add up, but by then it’s too late.”
“Why do you pretend what we do is nothing?” she asked. “Every day, all the chaos and messiness of life happens and every day we clean it all up. Without us, they would just wallow in filth and disorder and nothing of any consequence would ever get done. Who taught you to sneer at that? I’ll tell you who. Someone who took their mother for granted.”
“But you told me you were worried about her little girl and now I can’t stop thinking about that. She may not roll out the welcome wagon, but you convinced me we’re doing what’s right. Don’t convince me to come out halfway and then go back in.”
“You know,” he said, “I got interrupted during a meal recently. It was very upsetting.”
