“He’s a wreck,” I said.Laughing, my mom patted my knee. “They all are the first time.”

“I want a one hundred percent guarantee that they’ll all be fine.” Itell Mrs. Garcia.She pats my knee. “Unfortunately, there are no guarantees in life.”

“My dad kept giving me "love pats." Love pats are soft punches of encouragement that are administered on the knee, shoulder, and arm.”

“‎"Someday I'm going to marry someone like my mom and I'll be smiling all the time the way my Mom and Dad are.”

“Mom always said I was born to sit in the electric chair, but I'm proving her wrong. I'm going to die on my knees, begging for my life.”

“Mom, mom, mom, mom! A yowl rose from my gut, my bowels, my womb, raw as a birth cry but with no hope in it, a maddening howl, a roar, the water a wailing wall shattering around me. Unsyllabled, thoughtless, the cry rose from the oldest cells in my body. I hadn't known grief could be so primal, so crude. The violence shook me. When it stopped, I fell to my knees in the shower, and the water called to the water in me; I wanted to melt, to run down the drain and under the city to the creek and then to the river thirty miles away. Mom, mom, mom, mom!”