Thursday, August 15, 2013

the last book I ever read (Mary Coin by Marisa Silver, excerpt ten)



from Marisa Silver's Mary Coin:

Trevor stood behind Ellie, bowing his head as the doctor spoke. He was a big man used to hunching and stepping back so others could see. As the doctor delivered the bad news, he covered his eyes the way men did when they wanted people to think they were simply tired, but Mary saw his shoulders shake. She would have given anything to be able to hop off the examining table and wrap her arms around him, but she didn’t have that kind of agility anymore, and her robe would certainly fall off, which would do Trevor more harm than good. He didn’t question what the doctor said; he didn’t have the imagination to expect more than what was in front of him. It was her fault, Mary thought. You can’t raise children the way she did and tell them that they can be president of the United States if they just work hard enough. She’d always told her children the truth. The sharp and dissatisfied ones like Ellie and Ray shut their ears to her and wanted what they wanted. The quiet ones like Trevor and James listened closely and believed what Mary told them more than she wished they had. Trevor was a good son and a loyal man, a quality that had kept him with women who loaded all their unhappiness onto his broad back like he was a mule and then left without collecting their baggage. There were times when it would have done him good to be more defiant like Ellie because it took a little bit of ill humor to make yourself up out of nothing. And Ellie was a good daughter in her way, which was the way of making decisions about the right route to take to get from here to there or where a person ought to live out the end of her life.

Well, there was nothing Mary could do about that, either.



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