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The knife in my mother’s hand flakes into penny-stained rust.

Sometimes you weren’t a good daughter, the mother says.

With a world full of foolishly dangerous men, what’s a mother to do?

It’s a girls’ college we’re going to, but all the guys know Polly’s name.

Elinor had loved a man. The journey’s purpose was that she might forget.

Late March 2002. “Mud time”—so called in Mad River Junction, Ohio.

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.

I watched to see how the others lived, not knowing I was the Other.

These days I watch the world go by and do not breathe life into it.

My wife had time to form a thought: I have killed my daughter.

Cruelty is cruelty and you don’t ask why, you just hit first and hit hard.

I must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife.

She rocks quickly from side to side, proud, lifting herself higher.

My hands only knew. The painkillers in our mothers’ cabinets.

Susan Ann so wants to be that girl—daring, free, divinely sensual.

We didn’t think of ourselves as anything so grand as sex workers.

Love’s not all that fun, but it saves you. And you should be saved.

Love is not something you wait for passively, but a practice.

I simply wrapped my arms around Maxey and held on for dear life.

It suddenly seemed to her that the world was filled with little miracles. There were moments when love overcame her despair.

My mother was dead. Almost a month she was dead, killed by me.

The graffiti suggests the most essential story of New Haven.

A finger on the bell, a quick sprint on light feet, and then stifled laughter.

Anchored off Biscayne Bay my father’s wooden skiff swings easy.

Dad was blind until six months ago, when he bumped his head in the fire.

Even then (Colin remembers now), it felt like the end of something.

i stored away in my mama’s empty perfume bottles smells and stories

These old guitar players were the last pure thing this country produced.