“What do you think,' she said. Her voice was rapid. 'You want tomarry me, don't you? Don't you think you want to marry me?' Waited forthe wisecrack. As she spoke she changed in some provocative way,seemed suddenly drenched in eroticism as a diver rising out of a poolgleams like chrome with a sheet of unbroken water for a fractionalsecond.”

“Then, at a meeting, Petal Bear. Thin, moist, hot. Winked at him. . . . Grey eyes close together, curly hair the color of oak. The fluorescent light made her as pale as candle wax. Her eyelids gleamed with some dusky unguent. A metallic thread in her rose sweater. These faint sparks cast a shimmer on her like a spill of light. She smiled, the pearl-tinted lips wet with cider. . . . As she spoke she changed in some provocative way, seemed suddenly drenched in eroticism as a diver rising out of a pool gleams like chrome with a sheet of unbroken water for a fractional moment.”

“Three or four days later he was still thinking about seal flipper pie. Remembered the two raw eggs Petal gave him. That he invested with pathetic meaning. 'Petal,' said Quoyle to Wavey, 'hated to cook. Hardly ever did.' Thought of the times he had fixed dinner for her, set put his stupid candles, folded the napkins as though they were important, waited and finally ate alone, the radio on for company. And later dined with the children, shoveling in canned spaghetti, scraping baby food off small chins. 'Once she gave me two eggs. Raw eggs for a present.' He had made an omelet of them, hand-fed her as thought she were a nestling bird. And saved the shells in a paper cup on top of the kitchen cabinet. Where they still must be. ”

“Are you like an enchanted thing? A damn story where some girl lets a warty old toad sleep in her shoe and in the mornin the toad's a good-lookin dude makin omelettes?”

“No wonder, he thought, that the panhandle people were a godly lot, for they lived in sudden, violent atmospheres. Weather kept them humble.... it was real muggy earlier, hot enough to cook a bear. Anyway, you get used a rapid weather change.”

“Billy stretched and yawned, his withered neck taut again for a few seconds. "I can feel the season changing," he said. "Drawing in. This weather change coming means the end of hot weather. Time I got out to Gaze Island and worked on me poor old father's grave. Put it off last year and the year before." Some sadness straining the words. Billy seemed stored in an envelope; the flap sometimes lifted, his flattened self sliding onto the table.”

“I didn't have a chance to buy you anything," she said, then held both closed hands toward him. Uncurled her fingers. In each cupped palm a brown egg. He took them. They were cold. He thought it a tender, wonderful thing to do. She had given him something, the eggs, after all, only a symbol, but they had come from her hands as a gift. To him. It didn't matter that he'd bought them himself at the supermarket the day before. He imagined she understood him, that she had to love him to know that it was the outstreched hands, the giving, that mattered.”