“Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.”

“She put her head down on the table and cried all the tears that she knew she should have cried in the past year and a half. But they weren't ready then, they were now.”

“When I told her my love would stop her tears from falling, she started laughing. She laughed so hard she started crying. Damn. Double damn!”

“She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory.”

“And, as Rhonda told the story, she thought: this is how the past gets passed down. This is how memories are made. Half-invented, embellished, given a touch of whimsy.”

“She cried then, letting the raw emotions overtake her. She cried for the loss of her youth that bled out on a bathroom floor many years ago. She cried for the fairytale shattered by an exploding gun. She cried for all of the things she could not tell him, the regret, the fear of a future marked by desperation for things she could never have. She cried for the babies she would never bear. She pleaded for God to take away her memories of him, but they came one by one, spilling into the forefront of her mind, vivid as the moment they had just happened. And she was seventeen all over again, lying beside him in his warm bed, and had just loved him, was drunk with the love he had poured into her.”