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| Epigraph |
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. ---James Baldwin  | |
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For my mother and father
Blessed forever in both | |
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It was a put-up job, and we all knew it by then. | |
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They decide what they want and then they try to make you believe you want it, too. I always wondered if they wrote him off because his name was Elmer. The government people talked a lot about the future. Elmer was such an old guy's name, a piece of the past. My mother was a person of stature in Miller's Valley. She'd lived there all her life. Her mother had raised her and her younger sister, Ruth, in a one-story three-room house at the edge of the valley with a pitted asphalt roof and a falling-down porch, and when she'd married my father and become a Miller she'd moved to his family's farm, right at the center of the valley, in its lowest place, where the fog lay thick as cotton candy on damp mornings. The night was so quiet you could hear the wood doves comforting themselves with their own soft voices in the fields. A deer ran through my headlights like a ghost, and I slowed down because, like my father always said, there's almost never just one. I would have felt sorry for him except that he was so good-natured that lots of times he didn't even recognize meanness when it was coming right at him. I was the closest thing my aunt Ruth had to the outside world. When I was a kid it seemed like God's will was always that bad things happened, mostly to nice people. I figured that most of being a kid consisted of eavesdropping, trying to figure older people out and understand what they were going to do next, because whatever they were going to do next was surely going to have some effect on you. My mother had never bought me a dress that didn't have a hem three inches deep so it could be let down, with a tidewater mark that showed where the old hem used to be. I didn't need to see my father's face to know he was smiling. I remember I leaned so hard against the refrigerator that I could feel it humming through the backs of my legs. Since he'd left, the house seemed like a baby's rattle with all the jingly things inside gone. And then it was all over, or just beginning. When it was time for him leave again my mother hugged him hard in the kitchen while Tommy sobbed on her shoulder like some tormented version of his old self. He pulled himself together and tried to pretend like nothing had happened, but it was one of those moments you can't ever take back, that you remember forever. I believe in love at first sight. The funny thing was, a lot of people had come to believe it was a war wound. I guess it was. I guess Tommy's whole life now was a war wound. He made it feel like life was a party, and he was hosting it. The good thing about a small town is the same thing that's a bad thing about a small town, and that's that everybody knows your business. I don't even think she cried in my father's hospital room, or maybe she did when she was alone, when there was no one to see, like that thing about a tree falling in the forest. I'll remember the quiet in that kitchen for the rest of my life. It felt like it went on and on, filling the room from floor to ceiling, almost like it was a gas or a fog or something. It had weight and mass. But Tommy had been that way even before, a guy who showed up, drunk or sober, with the whites of his eyes hatched in red and fading marks on his hands and arms, a guy who was living in ways you could only imagine and then didn't want to. Sometimes there are things that you've rehearsed so many times, thought about so often, that when they happen it's like they already happened a long long time ago. "You don't have to like somebody to look after them. If you're going to be a nurse you better learn that fast." and I just sat there, amazed at the way the whole world had just tilted while we were sitting at that table. He looked like Jesus if Jesus were hungover. The whole crowd of guys around Tommy had disappeared, as though I'd made some sort of force field that drove them away. | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English
None ▾LibraryThing members' description ▾Book descriptions Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0812996089, Hardcover)
Filled with insights that are hallmarks of Anna Quindlen’s bestsellers, this extraordinary novel is about a woman coming of age, as she unearths secrets about her family and her town, and surprising truths about herself. (retrieved from Amazon Wed, 02 Dec 2015 16:58:08 -0500) ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. |
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(3.94)
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I saw many echoes of my own family in this depiction, and I’m guessing I’m not alone. With due respect to Tolstoy, all families, happy, unhappy and in-between, share enough similarities that most of us can relate to a family tale. I really loved Miriam, an unsentimental person with a lot of insight that kids could not appreciate. My only quibble with the story is that there was a last-minute piece of melodramatic plotting that I could have lived without. I would rather have seen the interesting relationship between the two sisters fleshed out a bit more. (