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And in that moment, Charlotte, too, experienced a falling away; her life fell away, her friends—they fell away. She’d been clinging to them these past weeks, wanting to be like Melanie Trier, like other people. But now she saw, or felt, that this wasn’t possible. She made her choice: Moose, and Mic…

A machine pulled the grain in buckets out of the railroad cars, a machine weighed the grain and a machine poured it into bins to be stored, which meant that no one had to haul those heavy sacks of grain around a dock anymore, because no one even put their grain in sacks anymore …

Moose felt a …

She lit a second cigarette, narrowing her eyes at the lawn, the very same lawn where she’d played as a child. Here she was, at thirty-six; with the brutal efficiency of a Greek tragedy she’d been thrust into the very life she had sought to escape. Ellen had dragged Harris back to Rockford—true, tru…

[...] It had started at a dinner party in Gordon’s house, a memory Ellen hoarded, allowing it to open only rarely, at special times, like a music box whose tune fades imperceptibly with each playing: herself standing by a windowsill crowded with African violets, looking out at the yard. Gordon touc…

I flicked on the lights, and my apartment ambushed me. I can sell the apartment, I thought. I can sell the sectional couch. I could sell the expensive necklaces and bracelets and earrings I’d been given over the years by rich, insolent playboys. I could sell my kitchen appliances. My towels, my…