As she brought prospective buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag.

I don't do much public speaking. I did a lot of stuff for Bones, and then ended up having said yes to a lot of things that kept me on the road for a while for that, but then I pretty much stopped. I'm touring for this book, but when the tour is done, that'll be the end of it.

I couldn't help but think, as I watched him, of the barrels of toxic fluids that had accrued behind Hal's bike shop where the scrub lining the railroad tracks had offered local companies enough cover to dump a stray contaner or two. Everything had been sealed up, but things were beginning to leak out. I had come to both pity and respect Len in the years since my mother left. He followed the physical to try to understand things that were impossible to comphrehend. In that, I could see, he was like me.

His love for my mother wasn't about looking back and loving something that would never change. It was about loving my mother for everything -- for her brokenness and her fleeing, for her being there right then in that moment before the sun rose and the hospital staff came in. It was about touching that hair with the side of his fingertip, and knowing yet plumbing fearlessly the depths of her ocean eyes.

So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything.

I missed her then but it was an odd sort of missing because by then, I knew the meaning of forever.

I had always been in love with him. I counted the lashes of each closed eye. He had been my almost, my might have been, and I did not want to leave him