I guess no matter what your family is like, you're not surprised.

Why do you have a cigarette lighter in your glove compartment?" her husband, Jack, asked her. "I'm bored with knitting. I've taken up arson

I feel that I an everything to her.

He looks sad. Or maybe that's just how he looks when he isn't doing something else with his face.

Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion into words.

The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can’t know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it’s all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway.

Outside it's a perfect spring night. We stand on the sidewalk in front of our apartment building, and Henry takes my hand, and I look at him, and I raise our joined hands and Henry twirls me around and soon we're dancing down Belle Plaine Avenue, no music but the sound of cars whoosing by and our own laughter, and the smell of cherry blossoms that fall like snow on the sidewalk as we dance underneath the tress.