In the fall he picked up his phone one afternoon to hear Grandma Lynn.'Jack, ' my grandmother announced, 'I am thinking of coming to stay.' My father was silent, but the line was riddled with his hesitation.' I would like to make myself available to you and the children. I've been knocking around in this mausoleum long enough.'' Lynn, we're just beginning to start over again, ' he stammered. Still, he couldn't depend on Nate's mother to watch Buckley forever. Four months after my mother left, her temporary absence was beginning to take on the feel of permanence. My grandmother insisted. I watched her resist the remaining slug of vodka in her glass. 'I will contain my drinking until'- she thought hard here- 'after five o'clock, and, ' she said, ' what the hell, I'll stop altogether if you should find it necessary.'' Do you know what you're saying?' My grandmother felt a clarity from her phone hand down to her pump-encased feet. 'Yes, I do. I think' It was only after he got off the phone that he let himself wonder, Where will we PUT her? It was obvious to everyone. ~pgs 213-214; Grandma Lynn and Jack;. Alice Sebold
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In the fall he picked up his phone one afternoon to hear Grandma Lynn.'Jack,' my grandmother announced, 'I am thinking of coming to stay.' His response was silence, but the line was riddled with hesitation. 'Lynn, we're just beginning to start over again,' he stammered. Still, he couldn't depend on Nate's mother to watch Buckley forever. Four months after my mother left, her temporary absence was beginning to take on the feel of permanence.

Jack knew that my grandmother (who was not only a drinker but a smoker and a gambler) would be around for a while and she never did like change, so she had to go. My father tried explaining it to her: Nate's mother had been gone for four months and she had moved on with her life; my mother (and this was true) had been living in Idaho and an opportunity had come up at her job; Jack never had liked change and he couldn't help feeling that moving into an apartment with my father would be like moving into an apartment with a stranger; while Jack didn't mind staying in his house alone while my father worked downstairs, he couldn't see himself sharing it with another family member. 'Why do you have to go?' my father asked her. "I think I'll come over here for the summer,'' she said.'I don't know why I'm doing this,' she said. 'It's not like me.

But if you need me, I will be there.''We need you,'' my father said.'We do,'' she said."The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.'' ~pgs 212-213; Grandma Lynn and Jack;

Source: The Lovely Bones

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