Lakeside Quotes

He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same words: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.

It faded slowly, ebbing like the tide. He rolled onto his back, staring up, his head still aching. The black clouds were beginning to roll back, showing a widening strip of blue; the Angel was gone, the lake surging under the growing light as if the water were boiling. Simon began to sit up slowly, his eyes squinted painfully against the sun. He could see someone racing down the path from the farmhouse to the lake. Someone with long black hair, and a purple jacket that flew out behind her like wings. She hit the end of the path and leaped onto the lakeside, her boots kicking up puffs of sand behind her. She reached him and threw herself sand behind her. She reached him and threw herself down, wrapping her arms around him. “Simon,” she whispered. He could feel the strong, steady beat of Isabelle’s heart. “I thought you were dead,” she went on. “I saw you fall down, and—I thought you were dead.” Simon let her hold him, propping himself up on his hands. He realized he was listing like a ship with a hole in the side, and tried not to move. He was afraid that if he did, he would fall over. “I am dead.” “ I know,” Izzy snapped. “I mean more dead than usual.

She'd heard enough regrets in her lifetime to know that dreams don't always die because of something terrible, but more often because of something that's merely acceptable.

People here liked to say they rooted for the underdog, but some of them got real quiet when the underdog was different from them.

There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies—a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child.

The warehouse was a part of the wharves down at the lakeside, and even the chill waters of Lake Michigan were warmer than usual. They filled the air with more than the average water-scent of mud and mildew and eau de dead fishy.

Do you know what happened to the dinosaurs? The Others is what happened to the dinosaurs. A joke Captain Burke had told him his first day on the job in Lakeside. Except it wasn’t a joke. Burke had known that, at least to some degree. And now so did he.

Who we are and where we want to go determines what we do now and what we accomplish over time.

What am I doing here?” asked Shadow. “In Lakeside, I mean. Not in the world.

of his lakeside shack A watchman, Father Time, all gray and bent, Emerged with his uneasy dog and went Along the reedy bank. He came too late.

Sometimes you don’t die when you’re supposed to & now I have a choice repair a world or build a new one inside my body a white door opens into a place queerly brimming gold light so velvet-gold it is like the world hasn’t happened when I call out all my friends are there everyone we love is still alive gathered at the lakeside like constellations my honeyed kin honeyed light beneath the sky a garden blue stalks white buds the moon’s marble glow the fire distant & flickering the body whole bright- winged brimming with the hours of the day beautiful nameless planet. Oh friends, my friends— bloom how you must, wild until we are free.

He has a way of making me feel like I'm the only girl he sees.

There is no playing it safe when it comes to love; it's a contact sport for your heart.

All I want to do is go back to my apartment, cocoon myself inside a cozy blanket, and watch Love Island while eating a pint of cookie dough ice cream.

Ned had no clue how any parent could live a life without regret. Like most parents, he just had to choose which regrets he could live with.

It reminded him of college life, how you could see most of someone's possessions all at once in a single room, defiantly asserting a personality.

Let's jump ahead to the moment of epiphany, in gold light, as the camera pans to where the action is, lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame

What am I doing here?” asked Shadow. “In Lakeside, I mean. Not in the world.

Was mache ich hier eigentlich?", fragte Shadow. "In Lakeside, meine ich. Nicht auf der Welt im Allgemeinen.

I sit on a foldaway chair at the lakeside, sipping hot cocoa and admiring the sunset behind distant clouds, pondering my next novel, which will be more truth than fiction. More memoir than tale. It will begin at the Third Garden and end here at Little Loch Broom, floating on a leaf over clear water, a bared soul visible to all those who would desire a glimpse of a childhood most extraordinary.

San Francisco isn't in the same country as Lakeside any more than New Orleans is in the same country as New York or Miami is in the same country as Minneapolis.... They may share certain cultural signifiers - money, a federal government, entertainment; it's the same land, obviously - but the only things that give it the illusion of being one country is are the greenback, The Tonight Show, and McDonald's.

He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat. She disappeared beyond the lakeside willows. A flock of small birds rose up and passed back over him with thin calls.

As well as the [League of Nations] delegates themselves and their suites, there were innumerable campaigners of one sort and another, male and female, clerical and lay, young and old; all with some notion to publicise, some pet solution to offer, some organisation to promote. They gathered in droves, fanning out through the city, and settling in hotels and pensions, from the Lakeside ones down to tiny obscure back-street establishments. Ferocious ladies with moustaches, clergymen with black leather patches on the elbows of their jackets or cassocks and smelling of tobacco smoke, mad admirals who knew where to find the lost tribes of Israel, and scarcely saner generals who deduced prophetic warnings from the measurement of the pyramids; but one and all believers in the League's historic role to deliver mankind painlessly and inexpensively from the curse of war to the great advantage of all concerned.

He’d fly his chopper over the Berlin lakeside beaches, for example, throwing out leaflets that read, “The handsome young man flying this helicopter is Captain Dale Le Clerc. If you would like to meet him in person, ring him at…” with, of course, his phone number and the best time to call. These things would flutter, en masse, onto the tanned bellies of the West Berlin sunbathers, and the results were mind-boggling. Once I went back to his apartment with him, only to find a line of girls waiting patiently at his door, all of them ready to live the day

At This Moment Of Time Some who are uncertain compel me. They fear The Ace of Spades. They fear Loves offered suddenly, turning from the mantelpiece, Sweet with decision. And they distrust The fireworks by the lakeside, first the spuft, Then the colored lights, rising. Tentative, hesitant, doubtful, they consume Greedily Caesar at the prow returning, Locked in the stone of his act and office. While the brass band brightly bursts over the water They stand in the crowd lining the shore Aware of the water beneath Him. They know it. Their eyes Are haunted by water Disturb me, compel me. It is not true That "no man is happy," but that is not The sense which guides you. If we are Unfinished (we are, unless hope is a bad dream), You are exact. You tug my sleeve Before I speak, with a shadow's friendship, And I remember that we who move Are moved by clouds that darken midnight

London and New York, and the hire car’s Sat Nav told her she had driven 252 miles since leaving the airport. A whole ocean and half a state lay between her and Tom. She should have been upset but instead she felt numb. Back in the UK it was four-thirty on a Sunday afternoon and she wondered what Tom was doing, then grimaced as she pictured him pottering around the house in his jogging bottoms and t-shirt. He would no doubt have called her closest friends, all innocence, asking if they knew where she was. How long would it take him to work out she had flown to America to look for the lakeside cabin she’d inherited from her great-

This place is in your blood, but not your heart. Go find a place that is.

When we see too many battlefields, it breaks something inside of a person and they lose the ability to distinguish between cruelty and necessity.

After all, the risk has always been part of his appeal.

I'm a mess over you," he murmurs. "You don't even seem to realize it.

Never too tired for you.

It's lonely, to no feel like other, to not experience their apparent ease or success.

the only thing worse than restaurant work was the ceaseless, unpaid childcare inflicted upon an older sister.

Robert Frost said home is the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in. It’s also the place you start from, and if you’re one of the lucky ones, it’s where you finish up. Butch died in Seattle, a stranger in a strange land. Maybe that was okay with him, but I have to wonder if in the end he wouldn’t have preferred a little dirt road and the lakeside forest known as the 30-Mile Wood.

There's something that happens to the newly displaced. Whatever power or choice that was stripped away in the process of reluctantly leaving one's homeland is fervently reclaimed in other situations, and honing in on the best spot to sit and enjoy a meal, be it at a restaurant or a lakeside, takes on the utmost importance. . . . If nothing else, we were always prepared for any and all circumstances and with plenty of provisions to see us through.

One thing she’d learned over the last year was that no matter what your plans were for your life, God or the universe or maybe even your guardian angels might present a much better plan for you if you stayed open to the possibilities.

A short, older man stepped up to me, sticking out his hand and saying something I couldn't hear. Thinking, "Now who's this?" I took out one of my ear monitors and said, "Sorry, I couldn't hear you." He spoke again, smiling, "Hello, I'm Charlie Watts." "Oh!" I said, taken aback, "Hello." And I shook his hand. He asked if we were going on soon, and I said yes, any minute, and he said, with a twinkle, "I'm going to watch you!" I suppose if I could have felt more pressured, that might have done it, but I was already at maximum intensity — there was no time to think of Charlie Watts and the Rolling Stones, watching them on The T.A.M.I. Show or "Ed Sullivan" when I was twelve-and-a-half, hearing "Satisfaction" snarling down the midway at Lakeside Park, Gimme Shelter at the cinema in London, listening to Charlie's beautiful solo album, Warm and Tender, so many times late at night in Quebec, or any of the other million times Charlie Watts and his band had been part of my life.

Winter was her cathedral, and the snow-decked trees its endless pillars, and although it was quiet, it wasn't empty. The silence coaxed voices into her imagination, voices of the past and future, voices of animals and people both common and divine.

If you were to ask the developers of Lakeside or any shopping center what they are offering consumers (formerly known as “people”) they’d say, “It’s all under one roof”—great, a ceiling, and, more importantly, “choice.” Choice is the key. Apparently, then, what excited me as a bulimic Smiths fan and onanist was the possibility of choice, and for anybody to be stimulated by the idea of choice, the precondition must be a lack of choice. Which is a way of saying a lack of power, a lack of freedom.

But he was ecstatic, because the prospect of those endless years of hard labor did not seem like a burden to him. Bill Gates had that same feeling when he first sat down at the keyboard at Lakeside. And the Beatles didn't recoil in horror when they were told they had to play eight hours a night, seven days a week. They jumped at the chance. Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.

...had the management of The Enchanted Hunters lost its mind one summer day and commissioned me to redecorate their dining room with murals of my own making, this is what I might have thought up, let me list some fragments: There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies: a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smearing pink, a sigh, a wincing child.

Some lives are like steps and stairs, every period an achievement built on a previous success. Other lives hum with the arc of the swift spear. Only ever one thing, that dedicated life, from start to finish, but how magnificently concentrated its journey. The trajectory seems so true as to be proof of predestination. Still other lives are more like the progress of a child scrabbling over boulders at a lakeside—now up, now down, always the destination blocked from view. Now a wrenched ankle, now a spilled sandwich, now a fishhook in the face.

It's almost hard to believe that this is in the same country as Lakeside," he said. Wednesday glared at him. Then he said, "It's not. San Francisco isn't in the same country as Lakeside any more than New Orleans is in the same country as New York or Miami is in the same country as Minneapolis." "Is that so?" said Shadow, mildly. "Indeed it is. They may share certain cultural signifiers - money, a federal government, entertainment; it's the same land, obviously - but the only things that give it the illusion of being one country are the green-back, The Tonight Show, and McDonald's.

Let's jump ahead to the moment of epiphany, in gold light, as the camera pans to where the action is, lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see the blue rings of my eyes as I say something ugly. I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way, and I don't want to be the kind that says the wrong way. But it doesn't work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats. There were some nice parts, sure, all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas and the grains of sugar on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I'm sorry it's such a lousy story.

I . . . hurried to the city library to find out the true age of Chicago. City library! After all, it cannot be anything but Chicagoesque. His is the richest library, no doubt, as everything in Chicago is great in size and wealth. Its million books are filling all the shelves, as the dry goods fill the big stores. Oh, librarian, you furnished me a very good dinner, even ice cream, but—where is the table? The Chicago city library has no solemnly quiet, softly peaceful reading-room; you are like a god who made a perfect man and forgot to put in the soul; the books are worth nothing without having a sweet corner and plenty of time, as the man is nothing without soul. Throw those books away, if you don't have a perfect reading-room! Dinner is useless without a table. I want to read a book as a scholar, as I want to eat dinner as a gentleman. What difference is there, my dearest Chicago, between your honourable library and the great department store, an emporium where people buy things without a moment of selection, like a busy honey bee? The library is situated in the most annoyingly noisy business quarter, under the overhanging smoke, in the nearest reach of the engine bells of the lakeside. One can hardly spend an hour in it if he be not a Chicagoan who was born without taste of the fresh air and blue sky. The heavy, oppressive, ill-smelling air of Chicago almost kills me sometimes. What a foolishness and absurdity of the city administrators to build the office of learning in such place of restaurants and barber shops! Look at that edifice of the city library! Look at that white marble! That's great, admirable; that means tremendous power of money. But what a vulgarity, stupid taste, outward display, what an entire lacking of fine sentiment and artistic love! Ah, those decorations with gold and green on the marble stone spoil the beauty! What a shame! That is exactly Chicagoesque. O Chicago, you have fine taste, haven't you?

Well,” said the older man. “Sometimes they didn’t survive it, and they died. Leaky chimneys and badly ventilated stoves and ranges killed as many people as the cold. But those days were hard—they’d spend the summer and the fall laying up the food and the firewood for the winter. The worst thing of all was the madness. I heard on the radio, they were saying how it was to do with the sunlight, how there isn’t enough of it in the winter. My daddy, he said folk just went stir-crazy—winter madness they called it. Lakeside always had it easy, but some of the other towns around here, they had it hard. There was a saying still had currency when I was a kid, that if the serving girl hadn’t tried to kill you by February she hadn’t any backbone.

The citizens of Buffalo, then a smallish lakeside town, embarked on a brief campaign, led by a local judge named Wilkeson, to clear their own eponymous riverway and so tempt the canal engineers to route the Erie Canal to a terminus nearby. Energetic lobbying, together with the clearance of the creek, evidently worked, for the engineers did eventually end their labors there, and the fact that more than a million people now still brave one of the country’s cruelest climates (with roof-topping lake-effect snowfalls drowning the city each winter) to live in and around Buffalo is testimony to the wisdom of Judge Wilkeson and the city fathers of 1825 in doing all the persuading, as well as dredging and prettifying the banks of Buffalo Creek.

Like I told you, you are the way you are,' Dr. Eaton said. 'There's nothing wrong with that. Everybody needs help sometimes. You just needed help with this.' She could never hear those sentences enough. It's lonely, to not feel like others, to not experience their apparent ease or success. For the first time, Mariel felt ashamed that she'd tried to hide what she viewed as a deficiency. It was the shame that was isolating, not the need for support.

I always thought of foxglove as a flower of the woods — deep in the shade, beloved of the bumble bee and little people. But the foxgloves of the Ness are a quite different breed. Strident purple in the yellow broom, they stand exposed to wind and blistering sunshine, as rigid as guardsmen on parade. There they are at the edge of the lakeside, standing to attention, making a splash — no blushing violets these, and not in ones or twos but hundreds, proud regiments marching in the summer, with clash of cymbals and rolling drums. Here comes June. Glorious, colourful June. ~ The foxglove, Digitalis purpurea, folksglove, or fairyglove — whose speckles and freckles are the marks of elves' fingers, is also called dead man's fingers. It contains the poison Digitalis, first used by a Dr. Withering in the 18th century to cure heart disease. Foxglove is hardly mentioned in older herbals — Gerard says, it has no use in medicine, being hot and dry and bitter. The 'glove' comes from the Anglo-Saxon for a string of bells, 'gleow'.

Ned and Mariel arrived at the stadium early, so he had time to relax amid the best artificial environment ever invented, and take in the aura. He knew people who felt that way about places like theaters and church, but to him, those settings were compromised by time and certainty. A play was never going to remove its most prominent actor halfway through act 1 due to ineffectiveness; a preacher would never crush the hopes of his flock and send them home disappointed a couple of Sundays a month. That’s why Ned loved baseball. It might break your heart, but you believed in it anyway. In a life of certainty, he cherished this elective relationship with peril.

While Joe Biden has throughout his career referred to himself as Middle Class Joe, a recent report in Politico titled “Biden Inc.” tells a different story. Biden has raked in millions in recent years, enabling him to live in a 12,000-square-foot home in McLean, Virginia, with 5 bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, marble fireplaces, a gym and sauna and parking for 20 cars. The Bidens also own a beach house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, to complement their 7,000-square-foot lakeside home in Wilmington, Delaware.

The sweet blood, the howling not-Wolf, had changed things in the Lakeside Courtyard—had even changed some of the terra indigene living in that Courtyard. She was not like the human enemies. She was not prey. She and her kind were Namid’s creation, wondrous and terrible.

Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.” Bill Gates went to one of the only high schools in the world that had a computer. The story of how Lakeside School, just outside Seattle, even got a computer is remarkable. Bill Dougall was a World War II navy pilot turned high school math and science teacher. “He believed that book study wasn’t enough without

But she was part of the Wolfgard pack at Lakeside. Just because she was alone, she wouldn’t turn into some blubbering human. She would . . . “Arroo! Arroo!” I am here. I am here, Simon. Come find me. “Ar-r-rooo!” Please find me. Then she turned into a blubbering human after all.

because he looks so good that it nearly incinerates my self-control on the spot.

I rifle through its contents, trying to see if any cans are at least semi-cold, but it’s full of girly shit like peach-flavoured spiked seltzer and light lime-flavoured beer. Did a sorority do the alcohol run tonight, or what? Who drinks that crap?

that said knight in shining armor is incredibly funny, smells like heaven and sin combined, and has a smile that could make you forget your own name? I've never crushed so hard, so fast

i don't know what i’m doing when it comes to her. All i know is that i can’t stay away. Every time i try, i feel like a junkie going through withdrawals.

you don’t need to worry about other girls, Vi. I want you so bad I can't fucking see straight.

Gaze locked onto mine; he fucks me; claims me; owns me.

What we believe about the Scriptures is revealed in how we respond to the Scriptures,” says Jon Vallier, pastor of Lakeside Alliance Church in Port Washington, Wis. (quoted in "Feed Yourself: Learning to Feast on the Riches of God's Word")

Kutluk and Magnu-Kelka were almost certainly not the first victims of the Black Death, but their remote little lakeside cottage is where the most terrible natural disaster in history begins to enter the human record.

The woman shocks me to my core, but I love it, and I’m at great risk of falling for her. Or flying.

I want her, even if it is only a ten-day fling, or eight, or wherever we’re at. After watching her interact with my friends and love on my boys all night, I know there hasn’t been anyone like her in my life.

I wonder briefly if anyone considers the other. The one who quickly falls in love with both children and father. What happens to her when her heart bursts with feelings for more than one Weller boy?

I want to be with you. There’s no doubt I want between your thighs and inside you, but let me be clear, it’s more than fucking you. I want to know who you are and why you’re so kind. I want to understand how my boys fell in love with you so fast and if I can get there too because I am falling. Definitely falling.

Please push me … Push me to be a better man. Push me to be what you see in me.

God, I love you so much. I never thought I’d feel so free…free to just love.

He left home early, as he always did, six days a week, fifty weeks a year. A cautious breakfast, appropriate to a short round man aiming to stay in shape through his forties. A long walk down the carpeted corridors of a lakeside house appropriate to a man who earned a thousand dollars on each of those three hundred days he worked. A thumb on the button of the garage-door

Although now I'm starting to see that the shiny veneer is just that. Underneath the layers of polish are regular people, with the same problems as everyone else; they just have prettier masks to hide behind.

As she left the restaurant, Florence stared through the fence at the dirt, looking for answers, but dirt gave the same reply it always did. See you soon enough, it said.

Florence gazed out her passenger window. “He’s known you your whole life. He knows you like a father would, believe me.” It’s true, he did.

Even if she lost this one, too, she had a partner, a job, and a home she loved. She lived a life that must’ve seemed easy and successful to many, one that many could not earn without a lot of help. She reminded herself that if this didn’t happen, to merely have this glorious life was no failure.

Thank you, so much,” Julia said, and hugged her, although her grandmother was most certainly not a hugger. It was like hugging an anxious postcard rack.

The way her father moved behind the bar was like watching the shadow of a cloud move across a meadow. Julia wondered what she’d have to do to inhabit such natural joy in this building.

All kids should have the experience of watching a parent be truly great at something.

Even if she'd never have another child, she was less alone for admitting she needed help. And accepting it.

She had a partner, a job and a home she loved. She lived a life that must have seemed easy and successful to many. One that many could not earn without a lot of help. She reminded herself that if this didn't happen, to merely have this glorious life was no failure.

Over the years, there were times she’d felt an urge to call, when a normal, well-adjusted person would’ve called a normal, well-adjusted mother.

She’s not going to tell her mom,” Floyd was saying. “And if she did, what would she say?” “There’s something you can do to get ahead of it.” “I know what you’re thinking. No.” Archie laughed. “That woman hates me. It has to be you.” “We’re not talking about this now. She’s in the kitchen, she’s probably listening to us.” “So what? We’re going to be gone in a few months. You think they’re not going to talk then?

Pilgrim’s Progress by Stewart Stafford Solitary steps in silence grim, As waters lapped the lakeside’s rim, In our time, before and aft, Magpies cackled, crows laughed. I drew level with a miasmic curtain, In vapour folds, to views uncertain, Sound grew thick in compensation, I took each step with trepidation. Sweet breath wind, fog dispersed, Marvelling at the ground traversed, The garden path to a shelter trite, As hailstones on my windows bite. © Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.

She put her fist in her mouth, and cried as quietly as possible, to not bother anyone.

You’re an asshole.” “Never said I wasn’t.

There’s a pecking order inside this vehicle, and stray puppies trump asshole ex-boyfriends.

By the time Carla reached the doorway, a young woman in white had beaten her there, opening both that door and the lobby door for the older woman in the wheelchair. This woman didn’t merely hold the doors, either, she was talking to the lady in the wheelchair, and making her laugh.

You know, I hope it works out with Floyd and your mom. It’d be the best thing for everybody. Especially you.” “Why?” Florence asked. “For starters? You’d be the future owner of the Lakeside Inn.” “No,” was all she could manage to say in the moment. “I want to be a teacher. Like you said.” Archie looked at her as if she’d just failed a test she was expected to ace. “You could do a lot worse than own a popular restaurant. Coming from your background, that’s an incredible stroke of luck.” “I know, but I didn’t ask for all that. I just want to do what I want to do.” “That’s a selfish attitude.” “I’m not selfish.” She tried to return his disappointed glare. “If I know one thing, it’s that if I don’t get what I want for myself, no one will.” “Floyd told me about how hard your life was before you came here. And if that’s the only thing you’ve learned from it, I feel sorry for you.

Oh! I have a great idea!” From her mother, this statement was usually bad news for somebody, often Florence. “I know how you can make a dollar every day.” In a month, at that rate, she’d have more money than she’d ever had in her life. “Doing what?” Florence replied. “Well, Floyd has done so much for us. And right now, he really needs help in the kitchen.” This is how a future gets derailed, she thought. She’d heard enough regrets in her lifetime to know that dreams don’t always die because of something terrible, but more often because of something that’s merely acceptable.

Florence was wildly relieved by her mother’s first reply; the only thing worse than restaurant work was the ceaseless, unpaid childcare inflicted upon an older sister. She’d seen it happen. Even so, Betty Miller would be here the rest of her life, Florence realized then. Her mother had stopped running, and Florence, somehow, found it in her heart to be happy for her, even as she knew she wasn’t done running herself.

In the summer of 1940, the entire kitchen staff of the Lakeside Inn was in love. Everyone, all eleven of them, were head over heels at the same time over somebody. Its effect on the food that was served was something that could never be taught or purchased. Florence had never experienced anything like it before, and the rest of her life looked for it everywhere.

It’s never going to happen,” she told him, and in that moment, that was the honest truth. And he knew it. “Well, then I guess there’s no point.” He looked so serious, she laughed again. “To what?” “To us, I guess. To being together.” Two big fat teardrops fell onto his cheeks. What had she done? “Al, no,” she said, taking his hand in hers, which he accepted, without conviction. “Can I just take back everything I just said?” “Only if you truly didn’t mean any of it.” He wiped his eyes with his thumbs. “And I know you did mean all of it.” “But I don’t want to break up with you. We can figure this out.” “What’s there to figure out?” He shook his head and took his hand back. “Why can’t you just be a normal woman who wants to be a mom and have kids?” “That’s not normal for me, Al. And why can’t you be normal? Why do you have to be the one guy in the world who wants to be a dad at nineteen?” “My dad was nineteen when he had me and he was the best dad ever.” He took a deep breath, wiped his cheeks, and stood up. “I gotta go.” This was all happening too fast. Bobby Eaton hadn’t even come back yet to get their order. “What? Hey. Let’s talk about this.” “But there’s nothing to talk about.” He looked her in the face with his big teary eyes, and it ruined her. She watched Al leave the room, and knew then what she’d lost. The version of her he once saw, the one that was so incorrect and so beautiful and so loved, was gone.

She wished she could. It was real love, unlike her mother’s marriage to Floyd. It was real because they were honest with one another, and the core of their bond was so solid they could argue without hurting each other. Arguments are the leaves, and the relationship is the trunk, Archie liked to say. One comes and goes, and the other doesn’t change, except to get stronger. He would know, because even when Florence was around, there had been a lot of arguments. Archie had openly soured on their covert arrangement, and had been trying to convince Floyd to move with him to Chicago. He claimed he had friends in Old Town who would welcome them, and they could live how they wanted. Floyd never had much to say about it when Florence was present. He was probably hoping it would blow over. Instead, it picked up more force each passing year.

Nathan had hated restaurant work. He’d wanted to be a judge since he was a teenager, all because some random customer had said he’d be a good one.

You know, Florence doesn’t ever go up there. My grandma’s funeral was the one time. She and Floyd have never gotten along for some reason.

Everyone knows that the worst invention in world history is the surprise. There’s a reason they don’t exist in the animal kingdom unless murder is involved. Florence believed that’s what surprises were—emotional assassination.

Even so, for such a long time, she’d never wanted a child. She lost the love of her life over it. And there was nothing wrong with her life that a child would fix. For fifteen years, Gustav had agreed with her. They traveled, ate in fancy restaurants, bought nice furniture, and enjoyed every minute of it. But about six months ago, he changed. He claimed it wasn’t because he had a mild heart attack, but a week later he woke her up in the middle of the night and told her that he needed to be a father. He wanted a family. “But we are a family,” she told him. “You don’t need kids to be a family.” He asked if she’d do it, for him, just one child, and because she said she’d think about it, he’d been wearing her down ever since. Now they were going to attempt it, in her hometown, of all places. At least she’d get to spend time with her mother; it had been a while. She hoped she’d also get to see Lois, Hazel, and Mildred. Maybe she’d get to see Al Norgaard.

It didn’t matter if Gustav was the happiest, calmest, most easygoing man on the planet—and he was pretty close—the anxiety and sadness Florence brought to their genetic potluck was so powerful, even cut with Gustav’s sweetness and light, it would doom some unlucky child to a life of profound unhappiness.

As Florence watched Gustav talk with Mildred, who’d had five children by age thirty, it occurred to her how overjoyed her husband would be with such an unruly brood. To her, the compromise was having a child, but to him, the compromise was having only one. Had Florence entered the Majestic Lodge through the employees’ door that day long ago, and not the main lobby, maybe he’d have met someone who was an eager and wonderful mother. But often, that’s not the way life works. People like Gustav end up with people like Florence, and children are born with their hearts already broken, for the mother they needed and will never have.

She got dressed again in the dark and went outside. She found herself taking a walk up the road, in the direction of the Lakeside, and when she breathed, she felt the cold lake wind on her lips.

Bronzie began to bark outside. Mariel followed her host back into the living room, where they watched through the big window as Bronzie chased a passing car. “She was hit by a car once,” Brenda said. “Now, she hates them all.” “That’s a tough way to live.” “Don’t knock it.” Brenda shrugged. “It gives her purpose.

It’s an injustice that she won’t remember any of this,” Florence said, meaning the vigilant love and duty that infant care demanded. “Then she’d already know how much we love her.” “Yeah, but this is what’s expected of us,” he replied. “We earn it through what’s not expected.