Red Kayak Quotes
"After all this time, I still ask myself: Was it my fault?"
"If none of this had happened, I’d be out there crabbing every day."
"You can’t keep dwelling on the past when you can’t undo it."
"Despite everything, I still marvel at how all those tiny ripples in the water can catch the sunlight and make the river shimmer like a million jewels were strewn on the surface."
"It’s a pretty river, the Corsica. But it doesn’t have a heart."
"You wait, Digger, you and Brady—especially Brady ’cause he’s always out in the sun—you’ll be all old and wrinkly by the time you’re fifty, and I’ll have, like, this perfect skin."
"I am not the type of person who prays very much. Hardly at all really."
"I’d rather be dead, I thought, than brain damaged."
"I knew then I would never be the same person anymore."
"I didn’t set out to be a hero. Honest. I just wanted Ben and his mother to be okay."
"It's not your fault. Don't you dare blame yourself. You tried, Brady. You did everything you could."
"Sometimes, being out on the water made me feel free."
"You didn’t have to make Ben die," I muttered before I began to cry.
"Good run," he reported. "Hauled in fifteen bushels. Mostly females, though."
"Don’t beat yourself, Brady. You did a great thing. You tried. You gave it your best, and that’s what matters."
"I knew they’d contrived the trip to get my mind off things."
"Anything happen while I was gone?" I asked, digging into my cake.
"You’re right," Mom said quietly. "I should go see her."
"I recalled the rope ladders we used to make for our pirate getaways and how one time the flimsy twine ladder broke, sending me into the water with a big splash."
"Whew! I needed to plow through the nostalgia and get to work."
"I gritted my teeth and went at it so I could knock off and go home early."
"Truth was, I was pretty happy about the baby."
"Overwhelmed, I decided to clean around the outside first."
"But then, a soft scraping noise confirmed my suspicion."
"The airfare to Providence, Rhode Island, was too expensive without reserving a seat way ahead of time."
"We sure did have us a time, I was thinking, and it was pretty neat, sharing a dream with J.T. and Digger."
"I didn’t even have to think about it. I nodded right away."
"Put it in a special place, and when you need to see your sister, she’ll be there."
"I wasn’t naive. I knew that this whole week had been a planned effort to get my mind off what had happened in the river."
"But I knew I’d just be hiding out. Postponing what I had to do."
"If I told and got us all in trouble, it would blow his family right out of the water!"
"I don’t know why Curtis chose J.T. to pick on."
"The person who defended J.T. the most was Digger."
"We were only thirteen years old. We once shared a dream together. Didn’t this matter to anyone?"
"It was just a thought. A crazy thought. Because it wasn’t in me to run away."
"Ordinarily we’d pick crabs on a picnic table inside the little screened-in porch we have on the back of the house."
"I knew this was the deal. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy."
"If you know right from wrong, then the answer is always right there, smack in front of you."
"We can’t forget her, Brady. She’s part of who we are. She always will be."
"It’s the wrong thing for the bay. And it’s the wrong thing for me."
"But I’ve sometimes wondered if it wasn’t because deep down inside I still harbored the tiny flickering flame of hope."
"I couldn’t fault your mother for that; my love for her runs too deep. Just like it does for you."
"It's not important, Brady," he tried to put me off. "Tell me, Dad. How much? I feel like I have a right to know."
"The money is important," I objected as I reached behind me, under my pillow, for an envelope with $1,200 in it.
"Please, Dad. Take it," I said, offering the envelope.
"Because I also felt that I should have given all that money back to Mrs. DiAngelo."
"No," he had disagreed, screwing up his little face and shaking his blond hair. "Scaw's not bad," Ben said. "He's just being mean."
"I remember feeling scared for J.T. and Digger. Scared and worried about what was going to happen to them."
"I wondered what he was thinking, and if he was scared. I wondered if someday, J.T. and I would ever be friends again."
"You admit to this charge? Do you understand this means you plead guilty?"
"There is not a single moment goes by when we don’t think of our son…"
"The most important thing you boys need to learn is that what you did was so reckless and so unthinking that a little boy lost his life."
"Everyone was talking in hushed voices, and I began to think that forestry camp had to be better than some juvenile jail place, too."