“We explored ourselves and each other until blue light buried the stars, and then she sent me home with leftovers and a new brand of dish soap that was on special at Shaw’s.”
“I absorbed the delicate contours of her face in the candlelight as the waiter, who grew up down the street from the Walcott-Schneiders and whose brother had just graduated from Cornell Law and who always made such good grades himself and who rather surprisingly and somewhat disappointingly had decided to pursue a career in the theater, refilled our champagne.”
“She didn’t believe in emailing Thank You Notes in lieu of handwriting Thank You Notes, but she did believe in me, and that made all the difference.”
“‘Hard drive error?’ I said, as she sat at the computer in her Lands’ End bathrobe, her face a landscape of bleak disillusionment. ’Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll give you a hard drive.’”
“‘Mother, May I?’ I murmured, because I’m all about consent.”
“I sat in the kitchen with her, sipping half-caff coffee and watching her clip coupons. The blades of her scissors parted and returned to each other over and over again, vacillating between coy and brazen.”
“She set her Jodi Picoult book down on the nightstand and I knew that it was on.”
“She takes the dog out and gets her purse and asks me with her eyes tell it to me she says with her eyes and I smile and she says it with her mouth her red mouth and I nod but she wants me to say it again with my mouth to say yes so I say Yes, my mountain flower, I want to go to Target.”