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What else are you going to do? You can get married or you can become a schoolteacher or a nurse. Other than that, it’s slim pickings—a nun or a whore or a spinster peeling potatoes in the corner of some relation’s kitchen.” “Women these days are doing all kinds of things—”
I read and reread her copies of my two favorite books, The Call of the Wild—which made me see people the way a dog does—and Helen Keller’s The World I Live In & Optimism, which taught me that if a blind, deaf girl didn’t sit around feeling sorry for herself and instead learned to read and write, then I could also do anything I set out to do.
There are people like Eddie, with plenty of book smarts but no people smarts. Then there are ones like the Duke, plenty of people smarts but a little thin on the book smarts. Then there are those rare few with both, like Tom, and they have
enough people smarts to know better than to show off their book smarts.
Aunt Faye’s pressing on Kat’s belly to push out the afterbirth and I’m still marveling at the baby’s little peach of a head and itty-bitty fingers like an opossum’s. I can’t believe that one day these tiny hands will take up a pencil or a rolling pin or a steering wheel, will slap someone and stroke someone, will tremble in fear and clap with joy, and I wonder what kind of woman will have these hands, what she will do with them.
“Everyone thinks they want to be in charge, to be the boss, but no one knows how tough and thankless the job really is.” He shook his head. “Sure, you get to give orders, but you also have to put up with endless bellyaching, kick the shirkers in the ass, tell favor seekers no about a dozen times a day, lie when necessary—and many a time it is—and accept blame when things go wrong—and many a time they do. Even with all that, everyone wants your job, or they want to tell you how to do it, or they want to try to take advantage of you, so to be a good boss you have to be steadfast and tireless,
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Sometimes the so-called law is nothing but the haves telling the have-nots to stay in their place.
The Colonel hated the weakness in the Duke, and the Duke hated it in his own son. Because he feared it in himself.
And yet, all this time I never really knew who he was. This man whose approval I so craved. He loved being loved, but he never truly loved anyone back. He took what he wanted from people, then once he got it, cast them aside.
