Her days felt like being handed from person to person like a baton, her calculus teacher passing her to her Spanish teacher to her chemistry teacher to her friends and back home to her parents. Then one day, her mother’s hand was gone and she’d fallen, clattering to the floor.

After a secret’s been told, everyone becomes a prophet.

We were already mothers then, some by heart and some by womb. We rocked grandbabies left in our care and taught the neighborhood kids piano and baked pies for the sick and shut-in. We all mothered somebody.

Poorness never left you, she told him. It was a hunger that embedded itself into your bones. It starved you, even when you were full.

Sickness burrowed deep inside you, and even if you were cured, even if you could be cured, you would never forget how it felt to be betrayed by your own body.

Sickness burrowed deep inside you, and even if you were cured, even if you could be cured, you would never forget how it felt to be betrayed by your own body. So when he knocked on doors, carrying donated meals, he did not tell the sick to get well. He just came to sit with them while they weren’t.

She’d already learned that pretty exposes you and pretty hides you and like most girls, she hadn’t yet learned how to navigate the difference.

These were the moments when adulthood was formed, not a birthday but the realization that she was now the one pouring a handful of candy into children’s bags, that she was now the one expected to give, not receive.

He liked to refer to his whiteness the way all white liberals did: only acknowledging it when he felt oppressed by it, otherwise pretending it didn’t exist.

Now they were slow and deliberate, the way hurt people loved, stretching carefully just to see how far their damaged muscles could go.