This is what daughters did. They left, and came home later with lives of their own.

I'd been running for years: there was nothing scarier, to me, than to just be still with someone. And yet, there on that dark road, going home, I was.

I didn't want to talk about what happened, so it seemed safest not to talk at all.

Nate: “And,” he said, “boys at twelve aren’t exactly slick with the ladies.” Ruby: “’Slick with the ladies’?” I said. “Are you twelve?

You just had to know where to look.

But God!Who could live like this , anyway, with the kind of guesswork that was enough to make a person crazy, just sailing along, taking bumps here and there, no course navigated whatsoever, with any big wave capable of just tipping and sinking you entirely. IT was madness, stipidity, and- (then I saw him)

And that was as far as he got before i heard it. The thumping of footsteps, running up the lawn toward me: It seemed like I could hear it through the grass, like leaning your ear to a railroad track and feeling the train coming, miles away. As the noise got closer I could hear ragged breaths, and then a voice. It was my mother.