Fighting took too much energy. Fighting would have ripped the scab right off the raw truth—that either God was so hateful that He’d singled us out for this (Dessa’s theory) or that there was no God (mine). Life didn’t have to make sense, I’d concluded: that was the big joke. Get it? You could have a brother who stuck metal clips in his hair to deflect enemy signals from Cuba, and a biological father who, in thirty-three years, had never shown his face, and a baby dead in her bassinet . . . and none of it meant a fucking thing. Life was a whoopee cushion, a chair yanked away just as you were
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