Sublime

All children want to be ordinary, and she never was, and that had been difficult – but all adults want to be extraordinary, and now she amplifies her strangeness, delighting in her ignorance of worldly matters and her tendency to speak sometimes in a biblical cadence, telling men she meets that she was born in 1887 (this being the year they dug Bet

Lally was a decade too old to be the subject of Farr’s interest. What a wounding relief.

Em had a slight lankiness to her. She wasn’t just slim, she was skinny, scrawny maybe, in a way Pat noticed other women noticing.

nisei

But there is a strange heaviness in her, like the beginning of flu. Not sadness exactly. She is not sad about losing Binny. Nor regretful about the nature of their relationship – things couldn’t have been different. Nothing would have changed the dynamic, no more than the elliptical orbit of planets can be altered by human hand. She had the only ve

And why does he never name the mother of his child, who presumably nursed him when things were bad, pressed pills out of their packets when he needed them most, washed him, held his body when it was pliant with sleep, saw the stitches dissolving in his spine?

At first Lally had dismissed him as a pushover. That was before she understood that sorrow turned some men soft rather than hard, and that soft might sometimes be better.