Laura Anderson Kurk Quotes

Hold still, Meg, you’re dripping blood on my car seats.”I reached behind the passenger seat of Tennyson’s car looking for the white sheet she’d thrown in for mopping up bodily fluids. Quinn, sitting in the back seat, read my mind and handed it to me. “Thank you.”“No problem.” He leaned forward, pulling a corner of the sheet up to wipe off a small stream of blood on my neck. “You okay?

Then let me be your mercy,” he said. “I’ll never be able to give you smart answers about why we suffer, but I can come into your world and try to be some kind of help to you.

What I know about you, Henry,” he said. “Is that you, as big as you are, know how to walk gently on this earth.

Thanet is having a moment,” I said, leaning forward so Quinn could see him.“What’s wrong, man?” Quinn said. “Were you not aware high school dances suck? That they always have sucked and they will continue sucking as long as the world turns?

I’d felt this before, when my granddad was in the hospital before he died. We all camped out in the waiting room, eating our meals together, most of us sleeping in the chairs every night. Family from far-flung places would arrive at odd hours and we’d all stand and stretch, hug, get reacquainted, and pass the babies around.A faint, pale stream of beauty and joy flowed through the heavy sludge of fear and grief. It was kind of like those puddles of oil you see in parking lots that look ugly until the sun hits them and you see rainbows pulling together in the middle of the mess.And wasn’t that just how life usually felt—a confusing swirl of ugly and rainbow?

Every moment of our lives we make choices. Most we don’t even know we’re making, they’re so dull or routine or automatic. Some are beyond explanation—like my mom choosing Wyatt’s memory over Dad and me.

I pretended to be a Cheyenne guide. I pretended to be a prairie woman. I pretended Henry was my old-timey husband taking me to our new homestead. I leaned down and patted Trouble’s neck. “Good boy,” I said. “Trusty steed.

Hearing my brother’s words coming out of Henry, this stranger in a strange town, made me feel wild with all the loss—wild and wired with no place to put those feelings.

We all think when we’re young that we want excitement and highs and passion. To hell with ordinary.”I smiled and she chuckled. “But when we find ourselves in these adult bodies,” she said. “When we wise up a little, or get slapped in the face by life, we realize we just want all things to be equal.” She put the heels of her hands together near her heart like the Yoga prayer position. “And we want to understand them better.

It was an oddly satisfying idea to feel bereft as I left my mother this time. We only feel bereft when we’re deprived of something meaningful.

Sometimes, in the stillness of my room, my mom’s voice came to me, repeating things she’d said for months. Like, “My skin is melting off my face, isn’t it?” And, “My whole body feels dead from the crap they’re pouring into me. Do I look green to you?” And, “When I’m naked, I can see my heart beating.

Wyatt told me once that if tenderness were a disease, I’d be terminal.

I’d known cruelty in a school—cruelty that would keep these amateurs up all night. But this kind of scene—crowds batting around a person because they thought he was weak—happened to be my personal trigger.

On the best nights, he’d appear outside the bookstore window and wait for me to unlock the door. He usually hadn’t had time to shower between doing things with cattle and horses and coming to find me, and he looked older than us and stronger than us.

You’re kidding, right? The whole town will know where we are just by the idle on that thing.”He feigned a look of shock. “That thing is a 1966 GTO. It has a name, okay? It’s Mack—as in ‘to mack on women.’ I rebuilt it last year, and I was told the engine makes girls hot.”“Someone actually used those words? Is it true?”“TBD,” he said.“You’re goofy. Let’s ride in my Jeep. Its name is Jeep.” Quinn chuckled. “Kavanagh has a smart mouth.

I recognized Meg’s swirly handwriting and crooked my index finger into the side of the envelope to rip it open. There was no letter. Just a picture. A picture of Meg holding a picture of me. The word HOME echoed through my body like a rifle shot.

Here was what I wanted to happen when I walked through the door after my first real date and my first ever kiss. I wanted my mom to say, “Dear God, Meg, you’re glowing. Sit and tell me about this boy. He let you borrow his jacket? That’s so adorable.” Instead, I came off the high of that day by writing a letter to my dead brother and doing yoga between my twin beds, trying to forget my absent mother.