Rae Meadows Quotes

She hadn't seen the mayor come in, though she knew he was behind her somewhere. She could sense the heat of his gaze, her hair prickly, her neck warm. How thrilling it was to feel this way, rattled by his mere presence, wanting only to give in to his pull. But desire was awful, too, full of trapdoors and sharp hooks.

Fred, in the light from the window above, looked for a moment like a newly hatched chick, with his twitchy little head and blinking dark eyes and face open to the world. Birdie felt something like fear then, something ragged and dark lurking just out of sight. Fred could die just like Eleanor did, just like the Wallace boy who'd gone to bed with a headache and died in the night when a blood vessel exploded in his brain. The slimmest margin separated life from not-life. Pastor Hardy boomed on and on. "We must be overcomers

She felt like the crushed petals of a violet, dark and limp. No, no, no. She bit her knuckle until she tasted blood. Cy was gone.

His dreams were getting more frightful - rising black swirls of water, cars floating by like river bugs - but he didn't know much about how to build a boat. The steam box was a start, even if he couldn't tell Annie, even though the line between faith and becoming unhinged seemed perilously narrow.

Maybe next year. Everything was maybe next year.

The Macks. They left." "Left?" Samuel asked. "For California, I guess. The whole family." Birdie pressed her lips together and dragged her palms across the rough wood behind her. There was nowhere for her shock to settle, a slow-motion spinning as the realization rose up and throbbed behind her eyes. She sat down in the weeds and tried to feel the splinters burrowing into the pads of her hands, but the pain was not enough. She

THE CRUST OF the bread was golden and crisp as Annie pulled it from the oven, setting it on a rack to cool. She stood back and looked at the bounty she'd been able to pull together, satisfied and proud. Ham, chicken-and-corn pudding, mashed potatoes, green bean salad, baked squash, strawberry pie. A good wife, she thought. A

In a span of months she had present for birth and for death, the wondrous first breath and the horrible last. But wasn't it an honor to be there at the end of life as well as the beginning? To mark the extraordinariness of a lifetime, to bear witness to its completion?

Her mother had come a week after the baby died, the only time Annie had seen her since she'd left Kansas. Her hair gone white, her dress starched stiff, her small hands as dry as paper. Annie had wanted her mother to make it better. What she got was "God decides what's right for us" and a butter cake she'd packed from home, made by someone in the congregation. Maybe something truthful, some real emotion from her mother, might have been a small bridge Annie could have crossed. But hers had been a family of hidden feelings, held tongues. "Life is so hard out here," her mother had said, unable to wipe the sigh from her voice, the disapproval, as if the Panhandle - Annie's choice - was somehow to blame for the baby's death. Annie had been too grief-tired to get angry, but she had had the thought, when she looked at her mother's stolid face, that she would probably never see her

Above the sink in the scratched mirror he looked grubby and bloated, his beard a grizzled mess. He knew what these men could never know: A man is who he is. That doesn't change. A thief is a thief. A bad man stays a bad man underneath. He'd been set at seventeen. "You want to end

Annie watched them all walk together, like sleepwalkers, she thought, jackrabbits trying to outrun them. The two ends of the line pulled in to form a semicircle, a giant net of humanity. *

He has an idea. For wood. Or Styron does. Something about boxcars." "Boxcars?" "A mess of them at the old yard." "That's good news. That's real good news." He smiled, and she braced herself for the three words that she knew would follow. "The Lord provides," he said. She felt

And it wasn't as if she could talk about it with Samuel, couldn't even imagine talking about it. Eventually she saw sex as part of being a wife.

Maybe God posted signs visible only to those with eyes to see. She wasn't one of them, but she could accept that maybe her husband was.

like upending the whole table, running until her lungs burned and her insides retched. With little wind,

Stay calm," the mayor said, though it was unnecessary. They were calm, resigned to the storms that had, over these months, worn them thin. How fast a new normal took hold.

We know everyone we love is going to die, but we don't know it, can't possibly believe it, she thought, or long ago I would have gone and started digging until I had a hole big enough to lie down in.

Beneath the damage she can still find moments of wonder, hints of joy. Would she even say she is optimistic? It isn't the shiny optimism that lifts Samuel, but it's a hard-won kind, born from the depths. A choice. It is enough.

She hadn't thought that much about sex after she and Samuel had settled into their marriage. There had been moments of passion, certainly in those early days - finally they could be together in that way - but she relegated her needs to a shelf just out of reach, as she thought she should, as women did.

It was only outside in the sun and heat that she began to feel the weight of what she had done. Her feet were terribly hot and slipping in her shoes, and the sand worked its way in. With each step she fell more into herself, and her stomach roiled with the curdled truth of her betrayal. I can see you, she imagined God saying. The basket of eggs hit her hip and one shell cracked, freeing yolk and white into a slippery mess, which dripped through the wicker and landed in thick shiny drops on her skirt. *