“Her face looks like a room with no drapes or shades.”

“Her face looked like it would shatter any second.”

“And how different her face looked the first time she really liked a boy who was not on a poster on her wall. And how her face looked when she realized she was in love with that boy.”

“It was unsettling to be in love with someone who looked like the face in her nightmares.”

“There are silences and silences. No one of them is like another. There is the silence of grief in velvet-draped rooms of a plushly carpeted funeral parlor which is far different from the bleak and terrible silence of grief in a widower's lonely bedroom.”

“A vast tenderness swept him, and a great reverence. Now she belonged to him and her face was his to shield. In regret and joy he draped her, his personal Torah, which now must be returned to the ark to await their covenant.”