McCall Purnell Quotes

“She was so sure, so present, so easy, so light and gold, while I was all gray and shadow. I was not ugly or monstrous. That might have been better. Monsters always command attention, if only for their freakishness. My parents would have wrung their hands and tried to make it up to me, as parents will with a handicapped or especially ugly child. Even Call, his nose too large for his small face, had a certain satisfactory ugliness.”

″‘I think I seen every island in the world,’ he said. ‘And you come home to the prettiest one of all,’ I answered. ‘Yeah,’ he said, but his focus blurred for a moment. ‘The water’s about to get her, Wheeze.’ ‘Only a bit, to the south,’ I said defensively. ‘Wheeze, open your eyes,’ he said. ‘In two years I’ve been gone, she’s lost at least an acre. Another good storm—’ It wasn’t right. He should have been more loyal. You don’t come home after two years away and suddenly inform your mother that she’s dying.”

″‘Call,’ I would say, watching dawn break crimson over the Chesapeake Bay, ‘I hope I have a sky like this the day I get married.’ ‘Who would marry you?’ Call would ask, not meanly, just facing facts.”

″‘So. What’s Miss Caroline got to say for herself these days?’ Call’s face flamed in pleasure. It was the question he had been bursting to answer. ‘She—she said, ‘Yes.’ I knew, of course, what he meant. There was no need to press him to explain. But something compelled me to hear my own doom spelled out. ‘Yes’ to what?′ I asked.”