Robin Black

“I don’t think about Terry every day, anymore. And sometimes I’m stunned by that fact. It isn’t only the discomfort of disloyalty I feel, it’s the fact of utter disappearance after death. The idea that as loved as we may be, we may also be forgotten. If only for a day here and there.”

“This is where they failed, all those years back, he believes. In taking care of one another when tragedy struck. It broke them, broke them all.”

“The notion of a country cottage settled in her thoughts as a watercolor, red bricks, climbing roses, the house the most intelligent of the three little pigs built, but with some age on it now; and the place they found in western Massachusetts wasn’t far off, solid enough to withstand huffs and puffs, small enough to feel manageable, large enough to hold visiting grandchildren, old enough to inspire optimism about what might, improbably, endure.”

“Jean Kurek looked a bit like a field mouse herself, with her close-cut gray hair, in her shapeless gray dress—no zippers, no buttons. Stroke clothes. Her appearance was no more or less distinguished than it had been all her sixty-eight years, the most likely description of her a string of negatives. Not really tall or short, you wouldn’t say she’s heavy but she isn’t particularly thin, not ugly, not at all, but not pretty either, her hair is that color that isn’t blond or brown. Arguably, her most striking feature was the absence of any striking feature—though her hair had finally claimed a color, gray. She’d certainly never been considered beautiful, not by anyone other than Cliff, who had been adamant on the point for over forty years; but if she’d ever yearned for greater consensus, that yearning had been tempered by her knowledge of how she would loathe the attention it would bring. Jean had spent a lifetime trying to be inconspicuous, appreciating that nature had given her a head start.”

“Leaning in, he kisses her on the cheek. Like an old acquaintance, she thinks. As though there had never been any passion, nor love, nor rage, nor anything much, just some traces of innocuous familiarity between them. Live long enough, it seems, and every fire can burn itself out.”

“It's unexpectedly painful to have become a pronoun.”

“It was 911 calling me. If you can believe it. Them calling me.”