Instructions for a Heatwave

Why is it that twenty-four hours in the company of your family is capable of reducing you to a teenager?

Gretta sits herself down at the table. Robert has arranged everything she needs: a plate, a knife, a bowl with a spoon, a pat of butter, a jar of jam. It is in such small acts of kindness that people know they are loved.

She sits there and feels the loneliness and the lack of him

She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.

The previous day and the day yet to come hang in a balance, each waiting for the other to make a move.

Strange weather brings out strange behavior. As a Bunsen burner applied to a crucible will bring about an exchange of electrons, the division of some compounds and the unification of others, so a heatwave will act upon people. It lays them bare, it wears down their guard. They start behaving not unusually but unguardedly. They act not so much out of character but deep within it.

Odd that your life can contain such significant tripwires to your future and, even while you wander through them, you have no idea.

Never chase a man, her mother had told her. No good will come of it.

She hadn’t ever wanted children and yet she had. She had and she did

What he finds hardest about family life is that, just when you think you have a handle on what’s going on, everything changes.

They have been together for so many years that they are no longer like two people but one strange four-legged creature. For her, so much of their marriage is about talk: she likes to talk, he likes to listen. Without him, she has no one to whom she can address her remarks, her observations, her running commentary about life in general.

Suggested Reading Atkinson, Kate. Behind the Scenes at the Museum; Binchy, Maeve. Tara Road, The Copper Beech, and Evening Class; Bloom, Amy. Come to Me; Edwards, Kim. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter; Ferris, Joshua. The Unnamed; Flynn, Gillian. Gone Girl; Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections; Ganesan, Indira. Inheritance; Hanilton, Jane. Disobedience; Jonasson, Jonas. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared; Joyce, Rachel. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry; Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees; Mapson, Jo-Ann, The Owl & Moon Cafe; McEwan, Ian. Atonement; Miller, Arthur. All My Sons; Morrison, Toni. Love; O’Neill, Eugene. Long Day’s Journey into Night; Pekkanen, Sarah. The Opposite of Me; Porter, Andrew. In Between Days; Quindlen, Anna. Blessings and One True Thing; Rosenfeld, Lucinda. The Pretty One; Sittenfeld, Curtis. Sisterland; Smith, Ali. There But For The; Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club; Tyler, Anne. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant; White, Karen. The Time Between; Williams, Tennessee. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway; Yates, Richard. The Easter Parade.

Her mother was able to strap Aoife to her back, as she had done with all the other children, to wade into the lough to fetch the eggs from the henhouse, built on a tiny island to keep it safe from foxes.

He had been thinking about a way to vocalize to her that he mourned its passing, too: the sense of the children’s intense, zealous need of you, their overwhelming urge to be near you, to study you, to watch you as you peeled an orange, wrote a shopping list, tied your shoes, the feeling that you were their study in how to be human.

He’d come home a few weeks ago and opened the front door, as yet innocent of what had occurred behind it that day, as yet full of trust that his wife was still the person she’d always been.

It is in such small acts of kindness that people know they are loved.

Odd that your life can contain such significant trip wires to your future and, even while you wander through them, you have no idea.

The Irish are good in a crisis, Michael Francis thinks, as he eases back the clingfilm on a tray of sandwiches his aunt Bridie has left in the kitchen. They know what to do, what traditions must be observed; they bring food, casseroles, pies, they dole out tea. They know how to discuss bad news: in murmurs, with shakes of the head, their accents wrapping themselves around the syllables of misfortune. A

A bee drones by, scribbling on the air near their heads...

When she first came to New York she knew no one. She arrived in a rush, like someone who trips when they enter a room.

Peter had been feeling lately that perhaps he and Jenny had come to the end of their story,

She doesn't like sitting about, no matter what is wrong in life. It does you good to have something ahead of you, regardless how small.

Mainly, she lived. She got on with the small acts of life. She continued to ensure that - in the phrase she always used inside her own head - she got away with it. No one found her out.

Had she been too hard on her as a girl? Was that why she’d grown up so fearful, somehow, so reluctant to make her way in the world?

…one of those terrifying rows where suddenly an end you never thought would come rears up in front of you, like a cliff edge you weren’t aware of.