“My mother could never have said she loved fall, but as she walked down the steps with her suitcase in hand toward the red Monte Carlo her husband had been waiting in for nearly an hour, she could have said that she respected its place as a mediator between two extremes. Fall came and went, while winter was endured and summer was revered. Fall was the repose that made both possible and bearable, and now here she was was with her husband next to her, heading headlong into an early-fall afternoon with only the vaguest ideas of who they were becoming and what came next.”

“She says it's really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate.”

“It could not have been easy for Mother, an only child, to grow up without a father and with a mother who was remote. Photos of her as a child show her extremely dressed up --Cornie's beautiful little doll. But a daughter, unlike a doll, grows up, and might fall in love with and marry someone her mother does not like; she becomes an individual with her own ideas.”

“You're lucky your mother died,' she said.I didn't like that. 'I'm lucky my mother died?'Between sobs she said, 'Your mother would have stayed if she could. My mother chose to leave me. She's still out there somewhere. I wish she had died instead.'I sat down next to her and put my arm around her. 'I'll never leave you.'She laid her head on my shoulder. 'I know.”

“Though here his voice faltered, because he knew as well as she did what came next, what words came next. If he could speak them, he might even convince her they were true, as his father had convinced his mother that Browning summer. It was the worst lie there was, imprisoning and ultimately embittering the hearer, playing upon her terrible need to believe. He could feel the I love you forming on his lips. Would he have said it if she hadn't interrupted?”

“With me, it had always been easier to fall. Now my sister...well she was the climber. She could climb a mountain while I could fall from 10 feet with my eyes closed. We were so much alike sometimes I swore I could read her mind, she was after all my twin.”