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"You haven't said a sympathetic word since I hurt my back."

"Because you're lying about how you hurt it," Gary said.

"My God. Again?"

"Two hours of soccer and horseplay in the rain, that's not the problem. It's the ringing phone."

"Yes," Caroline said. "Because your mother won't spend t…

After lunch he took his mother and his son to the St. Jude Museum of Transport. While Jonah climbed into old locomotives and toured the dry-docked submarine and Enid sat and nursed her sore hip, Gary compiled a mental list of the museum's exhibits, hoping the list would give him a feeling of accomp…

The midmorning light of a late-winter thaw, the stillness of a weekday nonhour in St. Jude, Gary wondered how his parents stood it. The oak trees were the same oily black as the crows perching in them. The sky was the same color as the salt-white pavement on which elderly St. Judean drivers obeying…

Caroline seemed to have forgotten how much her back hurt, but she remembered as soon as he went inside with the steaming, smoking platter of vulcanized animal protein. She seated herself sideways at the table, nudged her food with a fork, and whimpered softly. Caleb and Aaron regarded her with grav…

Most of the houses here, including his own, were made of a schist that resembled raw tin and was exactly the color of his hair