“My mother's perpetual now, tempting me with possibility. Weren't we silly, she might say? What was the matter with us? Let's be close again. My doomed and complicated longing surged, and I had to hang up. The two of us had no now. Our furious fires had burned everything to the ground. As I'd grown, each time I brought my mother in, called for her, or let her advise my course, I was ruptured.”

“I might have asked, figured her out, led her to open up. I was good at that. But I didn't inquire, a punishment. I didn't let anger go, habit from the dangerous family I'd left behind, from being leery of women. I was good at that, too, the guarded disappointment.”

“We noticed the parallels in our marriages -the forceful and decided women in charge, our quiet husbands, gentler than we were, gentler than most people we knew. We needed them, and they really needed us. It was nice to find a woman who felt burdened as I did by her own extroverted behaviour and vivid personality, by her own compulsion to manage.”

“I love her," I said, but I couldn't think of one thing I still did to show her.”

“She say, All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy, I had to fight my brothers. I had to fight my cousins and my uncles. A girl child ain't safe in a family of men. But I never thought I'd have to fight in my own house. She let out her breath. I loves Harpo, she say. God knows I do. But I'll kill him dead before I let him beat me. Now if you want a dead son-in-law you just keep on advising him like you doing. She put her hand on her hip. I used to hunt game with a bow and arrow, she say.”

“And I saw that all my life I had known that this was going to happen, and that I'd been afraid for a long time, I'd been afraid for a long time. There's fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world.”

“Seeing her was like seeing a reflection of myself, a mirror of my pain, my loss, my regret. A mirror of what stirred within me now – this love that had refused to die. She had found me. I had always felt her heart calling to mine just as mine called to hers, this power bringing us together once again.”