You totally get why the bees and bugs are drawn in too, so you don’t mind them so much.  We’re all taking chances.

The sun, unrelenting now, hammers my head. Blooming white and lilac azalea flowers spill from ceramic pots that line the famous Spanish Steps. Rows of people, most sitting, their faces to the sun. The winter coat weighs on my shoulders, high heeled boots bite my toes. Greasy sweat between my breasts.

The next morning, he woke up at his usual, pre-dawn time. He cooked an egg and smeared butter on wheat toast. After washing the dishes and scrubbing clean the pan, he left his apartment, and started off down the street, on his way for his morning coffee, having forgotten all about the ill feelings of the previous day…

The book was an entertaining read, though it left Jordy thinking of Grayson basically as a player with a God complex, suckering people into doing his work for him and catering to his whims. Through the window, now, Grayson looks like a diminished replica. There’s a band of sweat collecting along his hairline and his leg has been shaking nonstop since the interview got underway.

The plastic cup knocked over by the wind
startles you in mid-thought. It held
ashes that scatter over the parquet floor.
No need to move, the nerves settle on
their own oftentimes, every little jerk
and shake, the trembling lips and ears.

Wasn’t that the story of her life? Currying favor that was never forthcoming? Jess at 13 buying lunch for the whole tableful of popular girls so they would let her sit with them for that day only. The same Jess who had refrained from seeing a divorce attorney; letting Bart—her adversary—draw up the settlement agreement and sell the house out from under her, splitting the equity she was legally entitled to.

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve loved the word “striking.”  You see that word used about a lot of people now.  Red-carpet-baggers.  Grandstanding politicos.  Wheaties athletes.  Isn’t it weird, though, how it’s mostly only women and girls that get called striking?  Almost never men.  When its men that do most of the actual striking. 

Church bells rang out the noon Angelus. The ringing is automated now, someone told me. That’s not change. They still clang at their appointed hours. Two ropes used to hang down a long open chute behind a closed door in the sacristy. You could look all the way up the chute and see the clappers dangling in the bowls.
“Don’t let him get you in there,” one of the older boys told me the first time I served Mass with Byrnes.
I don’t pray anymore. That’s changed.

Learn to get just drunk enough in the morning that you have a headache by lunch time and cannot possibly eat a thing when the other wives invite you over for mediocre sandwiches and pilfered bottles of sweating cola.

He undressed for bed that night feeling reluctant to examine himself in the mirror. He couldn’t even muster the courage to look down at his own torso and thighs. Who knew what he might find? Some new bulge or wrinkle to prove how quickly he was closing in on his own death? Switching off the light he began to pull on his pajamas in the dark wondering how much Noreen’s intrusion into his life had caused these morbid, almost shameful thoughts.