"And in my head, words keep drumming: Special Registration. Deportation. Green card. Residency. Asylum. We live our lives by these words, but I don't understand them. All I know is we're driving straight through to that squiggle of a line on the map, the Canadian border, to apply for asylum" (Chapter 1, p. 1-2).

"Year after year we went on, not thinking about Abba's expired passport in the dresser drawer, or how the heat and the phone bills were in a second cousin's name. You forget. You forget you don't really exist here, that this really isn't your home. One day, we said, we'd get the paperwork right. In the meantime we kept going. It happens. All the time" (Chapter 1, p. 8).

"It hurts, this leaving. We weren't supposed to do this. We were supposed to stay and then one day roll the word in our mouths: home" (Chapter 2, p...