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[...] Cryptic notes in the margins of a grocery list: Consider a change. Remember to leave. The words "don't forget" crossed out. Affirmations tucked in a drawer in the bathroom with the old pregnancy tests and Vaseline: You are worthwhile. It makes you blush to find them but she's not trying t…

Tell your family. Use the word temporary. [...] Your grandfather will tell you that nannying is for foreigners and retards.

“She was riding in Marge Hasselbeck’s truck,” Lola says. She pauses for a moment to stare at Dot’s back. “Did you meet her at Ginger’s birthday? Lives about a mile down the road. Our closest neighbor. And her son looks, I swear, the spitting image of Julyana: all otherworldly and translucent. Unfor…

[...] Dot, for her part, had been cowed by Martin’s longstanding friendship with Lola, whose moods she was still trying to interpret. During their brief early breakup, Lola had sat for hours on Martin’s fire escape in the hideous frilly nightgown inherited from her hated mother, smoking like a junk…

Martin exits I-89 before he needs to and progresses town by town. He keeps pulling over to eyeball a fiery spruce or an outcropping of mica, admire quaint inns with ivy wreathed around their VACANCY signs and crumbling breweries offering hard apple cider tastings. He’s eager to reach Tunbridge, but…