“The bed was lumpy, the fire smoked so badly I was forced to extinguish it or die, then I froze to death the rest f the night because the blanket was so thin.""That's a shame. It was right comfortable in the tack room. I've a cot and a neat little pot-bellied stove."Dougal sent a thoughful look at the barn. "Can you put up another cot?”

“Can I tell you something? It wasn't so bad. Not so bad at all right then, me scowling at the dirt, James in his bed, the way it always always was. Look, if that's all that happened, if his dying just meant that I would be waiting for him to say something instead of listening to him say something, it would have been fine.”

“The room I got is best described as being a glorified closet. It was like four times worse than what they gave you here at Burnstone Grove. The twin bed looked like some little kid had died on it. It was made up with these totally sad, urine-yellow sheets, a moth eaten comforter, and a pillow that was about as fluffy as a folded dishrag. The mattress was lumpy and smelled like pets and weather.”

“I don't know what it is about "magic happens"-stickers on cars but every time I see one I wanna get out my permanent marker and sneak over and write underneath it "so does cot death".”

“Some part of me . . . had been waiting, since Kelp's death, for certainty that God . . . was either dead or malicious. On the cot, now, in the rain-shadowed room with the medicine smells, I knew it was worse than that. They were a challenge, a dare: you must look at the horrors of the world and find a way back to faith in spite of what you saw. I had a glimpse of what the purer version of myself might be capable of: enduring the loss, keeping the rage and disgust down, finding meaning through suffering. But it was only a glimpse. There was so much shame, and the shame made me angry at the thought of getting better.”

“Lovely and unremarkable, the clutterof mugs and books, the almost-empty FigNewtons box, thick dishes in a bigtin tray, the knife still standing in the butter,change like the color of river waterin the delicate shift to day. Thin fogveils the hedges, where a neighbor dogmakes rounds. 'Go to bed. It doesn't matterabout the washing-up. Take this book along.'Whatever it was we said that night is gone,framed like a photograph nobody took.Stretched out on a camp cot with the book,I think that we will talk all night again,there, or another where, but I am wrong.”