Katie Crouch

“These, of course, are not the preppy boys we go to school with; these are the dirt-in-the-cracks-of-the-hands kind of boys, farmhands and fishermen who, once school starts, we'll let drift away...But they're nice to us because they're country, and they're just glad to have any kind of girl along. They keep coolers for us full of beers and sodas and green boiled peanuts in Ziplock bags and tell us we're pretty as models. They're either blind or lying, but you know what? It's summer, and we don't care.”

“Don't you see?" she says. "I want your life to be better than mine. That's all any parent wants.”

“And then there's the truth beyond that, sitting like an old rock under green creek water: none of these things matter. Right now, in this moment, we have love. We have it in the sound of my daughter's laugher, in Mom's and Georgia's locked fingers, in the warm pressure of J.T.'s hand. It will leave, and it will come again, and when it does I'll give up everything and take it. Just like an addict. Like dry grass in new rain. It's not something I'm proud of necessarily. Then again, maybe I am.”

“We are all somewhere else, during.”

“I watched, hoping she wouldn't come out too broke. It's all you can do for people sometimes, no matter how much you love them.”

“Alex," Madison says through clenched teeth, "if you keep talking in bumper stickers, I am going to stab you in the face.”

“You're going to have to go beyond yourself to keep him. That's a tiring thing.”

“He doesn't bother to talk, and I don't either, but we look. We stare. And for a moment, I am sure of everything. For a second, with my bare feet on the fresh thick grass, there has not been, for any of us, even one mistake.”

“Without a bellyful of liquor, all I am is a woman who cracks stupid jokes to make up for being shy.”