His mouth moving soundlessly, a doomed fish in the bottom of a boat.
He would. Just as soon as he got the kid to eat, he would go into the bathroom and close the door and lift the tank lid quietly and pull the bottle from the water and let it drop over the tank to keep from getting the floor and he would take one good slug, that was all he needed, just enough to still the fluttering in his chest and quiet the basketball sneakers squeaking in his head, one drink and then he would get on with it, him and Jason the two of them moving though the world alone, the boy’s mother nowhere to be seen for two days now—or was it three?—and Bruce would limit himself to that one good solid medicinal slug of vodka and no more, and then he would, today, love his son a little less imperfectly.
Babs despised wanting help, but worse than that was feeling surprised by the need.
Babs look down and saw Jason had released her hand, and sure enough, that treasonous hand trembled visibly on the tabletop next to the crusts of her sandwich.
Pleas for mercy quivered on a frequency he could not hear.
The Man moved his right hand to pop the latch on the glove box—and the Statie saw there was nothing in there except the registration.
“Have you any idea how fast you were going?”
“Ninety-five.”
“On the nose. What’s your hurry?”
“I thought that was the speed limit.”
She knew Rita had heard the doorbell and she would not effectively plead with her to answer by ringing it again. This, more than anything, was Babs’s great strength—patience, rooted in an unshakable self-confidence.
knowing the rise was coming but not when, and that was the key to the whole thing, the inevitability of what crossed with the uncertainty of when.
It was as if her sister was at the bottom of a well so deep that sound could not reach her, and she’d been down there so long she’d lost any hope of rescue.
horror beyond language and thus beyond comprehension or utterance, the same ancient, adrenal horror experienced by the lobster held over a roiling pot, the elk when the wolf’s teeth sink in, The Marine pinned down by automatic fire in a shallow mortar hole, trying to press herself into and somehow through the dirt, screaming in a tongues for deliverance. Horror eternal, unchanged by millennia, and if you should ever be lucky enough to feel it yourself you will know, finally and forever, what it is to be truly alive.
everybody wants to make damn sure you don’t get the idea you’re meant for bigger things.
This was grief far beyond tears, a mind-erasing sadness.
all communicating in some language unknown to Lori, a primitive tongue accessible only to those who had lost their minds.
There’s always a reason, and it always falls into one of two categories: passion, or profit.
I am here to tell you that life, as it’s actually lived, does not fit into your neat little black-and-white categories. And I ask you, please, to stop being so certain of what I am and am not, what I ahve and have not endured. If you look at me and see a white woman, that’s your mistake.
“Ma’am, I don’t want any trouble.”
“No one ever does, and yet it finds us anyway.”
This is the only promise God makes. Not that we will have love, or riches, or health, or even life everlasting—that’s all conditional. The one thing He promises us, without requiring anything from us, is suffering. It’s our true birthright. When Simone and the baby died, and I saw the form my suffering would take, I made the only choice I could—to not suffer alone.
No one had ever loved Babs that way, insistently, without fear or expectation.