Backseat Saints Quotes
"When she said that it was him or me, the words rang out like church bells, shuddering through my bones."
"Last night, I’d made sex for him, too, in the same way, buttery slick and fat with all the things he liked best."
"I’d been pinned, limbs flailing helpless sideways, while he ran four fast punches down one side of my back."
"That gypsy looked at me and knew me. She saw me whole, inside and out, as if my skin was made of glass."
"Thom knew Rose Mae was there, though. He’d known she was in me from the very night we met."
"Sometimes I wondered if that bad girl hidden in the deeps of me was the thing he really loved."
"I was walking down the very road Thom would be taking. My heart bounded up from my chest, lodging in my throat."
"Thom’s blond head set behind the slope. He was gone. I pulled the gun back into two pieces and dropped them in the bag."
"This is major arcana. It can be the scariest damn card in the whole deck."
"The words looked more serious and permanent than ink to me. They seemed carved, as if the page was made of stone."
"I did love you, Rose. Pray to Saint Cecilia!"
"I’m not going to wreck my figure and squeeze seven pounds of baby out my personals and spend the rest of my life raising something up unbaptized, just so it can get old and die and go to hell."
"We’ve been here before, and I could push him either way."
"I felt like I’d been through a siege and the last forty seconds had taken a solid hour."
"I think he threw me then. I hung in space for one cool, unrippled moment, and then a wall rose up and stopped me hard and I slid down it."
"I couldn’t answer. I had no breath, even to say I hadn’t pushed, that this day was on him, only him."
"He was ready to let his fingers drift gentle down over me, searching under my skin to see if my bones had cracks."
"I’ll never unlove you, Jim Beverly had said to me, once, twice, a thousand times."
"Nothing to talk about. Him or me, and I had chosen."
"I wondered how he could look at me, limp in my hospital bed, and not see he’d beaten his girl clean off me."
"I concentrated solely on looking for a way to track a boy who had disappeared himself so thoroughly."
"I was back in her house, with the pretty ocean blue coverlet and sheers she’d picked, her willow-patterned china in the kitchen, the remnants of her light perfume tainting the air of the bathroom."
"With Thom gone and Jim beside me, I’d be ready to rebuild myself into someone nicer."
"I was Rose Mae Lolley, the prettiest damn girl from Fruiton High."
"I would go to Chicago to righteously screw him until he remembers his promises. I am going to reclaim him."
"I thought about that. It seems like that would make a girl… mushier."
"You bet," I said, and that was true, because nothing was more primal than survival.
"We are leopards making more leopards. We are sharks making more sharks."
"Yes, I remember your piece-of-shit disappearing boyfriend. I hope he’s dead and frying deep, deep, deep in deepest hell."
"I need an address and a phone number for Arlene Fleet. Two e’s."
"He didn’t do a single fucking thing to me," I yelled after them.
"What did he do to you?" I asked, too quiet for Arlene to hear me.
"Don’t you go nowhere," my daddy yelled at me as they walked away.
"I thought you was your mother. I thought you was Claire."
"I wish I had that kind of daddy, growing up," I told her.
"I didn’t answer. Bill let go of the scruff of my father’s neck, but Daddy stayed bent over the sink, dripping."
"I watch for you when I’m not working," Daddy said to me.
"I knew you’d come. I watch our old house alla time, when I’m home."
"I watch for you and Claire right through that front wind-er."
"Every little thing? Exactly the same?" I said.
"She didn’t plan to leave that day. Something happened."
"I came home and she was gone, same as you."
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"I think you might be having an allergic reaction," she says.
"It’s fine," my mother says to the police behind me. "I’m finished."
"I think I lived." Nobody is more surprised than me.
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