How to Read a Book

by Monica Wood

She’d begun their marriage as lead, soft and pliable, elastic and forgiving, but over the years she’d transformed herself into a high-carbon steel, strong and hard and resistant to wear.

The line between this and that, you and her, us and them, the line is thin.

“The sorrows,” Brittie sighed. “The sorrows of your changing face, oh my God.” “He makes the old lady sound beautiful,” Jacynta said. “Like if you love somebody, it’s their whole self, not their face.” Her own whole self shone.

“Perhaps it’s an oddity of human nature to judge women more harshly. Or maybe we expect so little of men, their transgressions don’t register the same.”

We are a continuum of human experience, neither the worst nor the best thing we have ever done. Or, more exactly, we are both the best thing and the worst thing we’ve ever done. We are all of it, all at once, all the time.

“It’s a finer line between any of us than we usually care to think.”

“Apologies require acceptance, so I thank you,” he says, nudging the bookends back into my lap. “But as I understand it, forgiveness flows in one direction only.”

“The problem with retrospect is it never shows up beforehand.”

Even the least eventful life holds an avalanche of stories.