I stood in the doorway of our mother’s front room looking at the shape her life had worn into that recliner, and at the evidence of my brother’s long, unwitnessed faithfulness all around it, and I felt something crack in me that I had spent nine years keeping very carefully intact.

Chapter 4 — The Watermelon Magnet

We worked the first afternoon mostly in silence, and it was the kitchen that finally cracked us open, because the kitchen is where a family actually lives.

I was wrapping the everyday plates in newspaper — the ones with the faded blue windmill, we’d eaten off them my whole life — and Terry was going through the junk drawer, that universal drawer of rubber bands and dead batteries and takeout menus for restaurants that had closed decades ago, and he made a sound.

Half a laugh.