It had been so long since he’d held a baby that it was as if the world had stopped making them ages ago. Tears disappeared into his beard. When he was finally able to speak, he said, “Look what you did.”

Neither of them wanted to be the one with a problem—if, indeed, there was a problem, which there might not be, because neither of them knew how this was supposed to go and who had time to stop and assess? Problems, in this way, win out. Problems conquer the world.

Even the most unbearable things became fossils, after a while.

Grief was a byproduct of war that no one had figured out how to repurpose...

It was as if he’d been carrying on his back all the things he’d been collecting over the years, and with their combined weight suddenly gone, he was able to lift his head.

Was this the birthright of his actions, he wondered—living with the uncertainty of uncertainty?

Therein, she thought, lies the unbearable solitude of a lie: you’re alone when you tell it, alone when you live it, alone when you try to dismantle it.

She was looking for understanding where there was none to be found. She was looking for understanding in an act of wanton selfishness. Forgiveness, the way her mother had described it, wasn’t something that shot up out of the soil; it had to creep in over time, like a vine.

Part of what had appealed to her about Columbus, when she was eighteen, was its vastness—all there was to see and do, and the chance to be a part of it. What appealed now was its vast anonymity, its ability to cloak people in its density, so that you could live your life without answering too many questions or encountering too many expectations. Right up to your last moments, if you wanted, so that the most lasting impression you left on your neighbors was that they’d known nothing about you.

His letters, they realized, were like light from a star, momentarily comforting but independent of a source that might no longer be there.

Whatever it was, it went straight to that part of their minds where Skip’s death crouched, and when it got there, it turned on the lights.

The world will always bring you back into perspective, if you only bother to let it.

What is it about time that confounds us? We spend it. We save it. We while it away. We waste it. We kill it. We complain about not having enough of it, or about having too much of it on our hands. We regret what we’ve done with it. We give it away. We want it back. We say “time and again” when something is bothering us and “it’s time” when something is supposed to end. Felix saw it so clearly: all we should ever want of time is more of it. Life was so simple when it was reduced to the barest of necessities: more time; more air; more Duke Ellington.

It had taken losing her, and feeling dead, and having her gradually take him back for him to realize what now seemed like the most obvious thing in the world: he could bear her forever, because he loved her.

The wisdom that comes with age was needling, he found, because it brought the clarity of hindsight without the means to change anything. He’d spent so much of his early adulthood thinking he’d been truncated in life, because of his leg. Because he hadn’t been able to say he’d served in a war, that great marker of identity. But war had marked his father in a manner that had left him forever damaged, and it had wiped Skip’s mark away completely. They were the truncated ones—them and countless others who’d gone before and were doubtless to follow, since the world that purported to want peace seemed always to be at war. All Cal had had to do was pick up the pieces of his own mistakes. In fact, that, as he saw it now, was his life’s work: trying to make right what he’d gotten wrong. Maybe that was what Sean Robison had been talking about in the fourth grade; maybe Cal’s special thing was his determination, after taking a wrecking ball to his life, to put it back together. Wasn’t it a fair measure of a person, what they did with their mistakes? How they managed to stumble into some of the right steps, after taking all the wrong ones?

This is why old people seem distant and distracted, he thought. We aren’t living in the past; the past is living in us. And it’s talking. We get old to be able to recalibrate everything we thought was going to be important. We get old just to hear it. It says, the days, the days, the days.