"Or, if they didn't think to call it beauty, they said courage - more appropriate to the occasion and the day - not meaning necessarily her new-widow's courage (with its attendant new-widow's clichys: bearing up, holding on, doing well), but the courage it took to look out onto life from a face as plain as butter: pale, downy skin and bland blue eyes, faded brown hair cut short as a nun's and dimmed with gray. Only a touch of powder and of lipstick, only a wedding band a small pearl ring for adornment." Chapter 1, pg. 3

"Better the women gather around Billy in real mourning, sit up with him all night if they liked, moaning about fate and loss and the inevitability of death, than have them turn their gummy sympathy, their studied silence on him every time there's a mention of love and marriage."

Chapter 2, pg. 31

"My mother...