If you live in San Antonio long enough, you begin to develop a tolerance for heat; and I’m not just talking about the outdoor kind. - P85
"You want to stay away from that one. It’ll bite you." - P85
As for Teresa, she’d supply the music—usually some type of folk music from the 1960s (I remember her playing a lot of Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez). - P85
"el diablo." It remained there in the middle of the room, solitary and untouched, even as people began to leave and Teresa cleared the table. She kept it there, as if not wanting to say goodbye to it yet. - P87
That winter I went there every single day for lunch and ordered the same thing: pozole soup. - P153
I had very little else in my life that I considered my own. - P153
but those in the know knew. - P153
I moved in closer. I watched Natalie lean her head forward, relax her shoulders. I wondered what might happen if I waved to her or called out her name. I wondered if she might see me, if she might come to the door, just this once, and let me in. - P60
It seemed like such a simple thing back then, but I still remember it now, that sense of anticipation as I walked up to the foot of their building and rang the buzzer, and the sight, a few seconds later, of one of their faces in the window, looking down at me and smiling, then waving me up, and then finally the sound of one of their voices, usually Rebecca’s, on the intercom, telling me that they’d just opened up a bottle of wine and that I should come right in, that it must be freezing out there. - P83
It’s strange to be forty-three years old and have no clue what the future might hold, to realize that you might have stepped onto the wrong train at some point in your life and somehow ended up in a place you hadn’t expected or wanted or even known about when you were young. - P82
The diehards at the end of the bar, ladling soup into their mouths. Where had they gone? - P155
He finished by saying in a quiet, almost inaudible voice that nothing in his life had prepared him for the incomprehensible task of burying his own child. He looked down as he said this, his hands shaking, and something in my body shifted. - P49
"Sometimes I find myself trying so hard to hold on to that idea of who I used to be, you know? It’s so painful to let that go." - P188
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