The Summer Guest

Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. Doing the unpopular thing because it's what you believe, and the heck with everybody.

They say that the moment your life appears before your eyes will be your last, but I'm here to say that it's not so very different when you kiss a woman like Kate, whoever your Kate may be.

But he’d done far braver things in his life—all his life—not the least of which was warming another man’s child against his skin while outside the snow poured down, and loving that child so fiercely she became his own. Your daddy.

Ten years, a hundred years, a thousand - once passed, I thought, time was all the same, all over.

I didn’t know I was so tired.” They had been packing for days, finalizing their arrangements, saying their good-byes. Of course she would be exhausted. “At least an hour.” Joe shelled an egg into a napkin on his knee. “Sleep more if you want. You need your rest. It’ll be a long ride yet.” They finished their lunch, and as they were packing it away, the conductor came through the car. “Portland, Portland is next.

insomniac dread that send us prowling the halls to mull over every missed field goal, botched kiss, and embarrassing pratfall of our lives

He would be forty-five now, a grown man, if he had not died that fall. His final pneumonia took him quickly: a fever that rocketed skyward, the tiny, bottlelike lungs filling, coma, death within hours. After all he’d been through, it seemed a mercy, though of course that was an illusion, something to say to fill the silence of his missing life: the bicycle he would not ride, the books he would not read, the friends he would not have and the girl he would not kiss. The thousand pains and pleasures of his life, shelved in a tomb that the door of early death had sealed. No, there was no mercy in what happened to my boy at all. When he died, he weighed just eleven pounds. It’s said that many marriages do not survive the loss of a child, that such grief is a room parents enter together but depart alone. I have no cause to argue the point, having sat in just that room. From that day forward we loved each other, Meredith and I, but we loved with broken hearts. And when, on a morning not long after we had buried Sam, I came into the kitchen to find Meredith standing at the window, cupping the curve of her stomach in a secret way that I alone understood, I knew we would go on.

The sight of a rich man dying is one to shake all your assumptions about a free market economy; here

I felt, driving home, that for the first time in many years, maybe ever, I was coming truly alive, and here’s the thing: the problem of being alive is that it makes you frightened.