when you’re given an opportunity to change your life, be ready to do whatever it takes to make it happen. the world doesn’t give things, you take things.
It’s always been fascinating to me how things can be simultaneously true and false, how people can be good and bad all in one, how someone can love you in a way that is beautifully selfless while serving themselves ruthlessly.
Kit, particularly, grieved the way some people drink, which is to say: rarely but always alone and to excess. So she could not keep Mick’s gaze at that very moment because she did not want to cry.
Our parents live inside us, whether they stick around or not, Hud thought. They express themselves through us in the way we hold a pen or shrug our shoulders, in the way we raise our eyebrow. Our heritage lingers in our blood. The idea of it scared the shit out of him.
She allowed herself to grieve every tiny thing—every hair roller, every housedress, every smile, every promise. She wanted to empty herself of heartbreak, a task both possible and impossible.
She was going to have to accept that she had always, her entire life, desired softness. Curves and smooth skin and long hair and soft lips. She had always ached to be touched with gentle hands.
And because June had not shrugged off his arm, Mick felt confident enough to kiss her neck. And because she had not shrugged off the small request, she did not know how to shrug off the larger one. And on and on it went. Small boundaries broken, snapped like tiny twigs, so many that June barely noticed he was coming for the whole tree.
But in the morning, her anger had lost its edges. It had morphed into sorrow. She was now overtaken by the dull ache of grief, expansive and tender like a whole-body bruise. She had lost the life she had believed she’d been granted. She was in mourning.
June poured herself a glass of orange juice and then popped the top of the vodka she kept in the cabinet and tossed that in, too. She smoothed her hair, tried to summon the dregs of her dignity.
Maybe our parents’ lives are imprinted within us, maybe the only fate there is is the temptation of reliving their mistakes. Maybe, try as we might, we will never be able to outrun the blood that runs through our veins.
And she thought, for a moment, that maybe she could let herself be angry at her mother, too. Angry at her mother for the burnt dinners and lit cigarettes, for the Sea Breezes and Cape Codders. Angry at her mother for getting in that bathtub in the first place.
The good thing about getting dumped by a dickhead is that you don’t have to deal with the dickhead anymore. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.
