But when Bumby nursed, his fist clutching the fabric of my robe, his eyes soft and bottomless and locked on mine, as if I were the very heart of his universe, I couldn't help but melt into him.

Sometimes I wish we could rub out all of our mistakes and start fresh, from the beginning,' I said. 'And sometimes I think there isn't anything to us but our mistakes.

The way I see it, how can you really say you'll love a person longer than love lasts?

Happiness is so awfully complicated, but freedom isn't. You're either tied down or you're not.

I'd had my share of rain. My mother's illness ... had weighed on me, but the years before had been heavy, too. I was only twenty eight.

To marry was to say you believed in the future and in the past, too-that history and tradition and hope could stay knit together to hold you up.

All that was left for me was a terrible kind of paralysis, this waiting game, this heartbreak game.