leitmotif,

Her mother’s ironclad dictum, badgered into Holly from the time she was a toddler: What you don’t want to do is what must be done first. Then it’s out of the way. This has stuck with Holly, as many childhood lessons do… for better or worse.

But love isn’t always support. Sometimes love is taking the supports away.

Never answer a suspect’s questions, Bill used to say. They answer yours.

“Well, it ain’t his folks paying your bills, I don’t have to be a detective to know that.” Althea puts her hands behind her head and stretches, jutting out a truly mammoth bosom that shades half her desk.

James Dickey to start with. You know his poems, and there’s a famous novel, Deliverance—” “I saw the movie. Men going down a river in canoes.” “Yes, but don’t read that one. Read To the White Sea. Lesser known, but I think better. For your purposes. I want you to read at least one Cormac McCarthy novel, All the Pretty Horses or Suttree. Will you do

senescence

“Old age is a time of casting away, which is bad enough, but it’s also a time of escalating indignities.”

It makes her think of a documentary she saw about Bob Dylan. A folk singer from Greenwich Village in the sixties said, “He was just another guitar player trying to sound like Woody Guthrie. Then all at once he was Bob Dylan.”