He put the blinker on, pulled out onto the avenue. "Well, that was nice," she said, sitting back. They had fun together these days, they really did. It was as if marriage had been a long, complicatd meal, and now there was this lovely dessert.

Each of his son's had been his favorite child.

Oh that's lovely," said Bunny. "Olive, you've got a date." "Why would you say something so foolish?" Olive asked, really annoyed. "We're two lonely people having supper." "Exactly," said Bunny. "That's a date.

You surely know that in the course of a long marriage it is not unusual for a husband or a wife to develop a crush on someone else.

Back and forth she went each morning by the river, spring arriving once again; foolish, foolish spring, breaking open its tiny buds, and what she couldn’t stand was how—for many years, really—she had been made happy by such a thing. She had not thought she would ever become immune to the beauty of the physical world, but there you were. The river sparkled with the sun that rose, enough that she needed her sunglasses.

All these lives," she said. "All the stories we never know." (125)

But after a certain point in a marriage, you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different.