theirresponsiblereader's Reviews (607)

“What’s your first move?”

“We’ve narrowed it down to Michael Wheeler or the rest of humanity,” I said. “So let’s start with Wheeler.”

I’d been treating cancer like it was the flu, an inconvenience that I’d have to put up with temporarily. Except cancer wasn’t just a sore throat and a fever, and chemo wasn’t just a shot in the arm. Cancer wasn’t a bump in the road—it was the road, and I’d better make plans to treat it that way. My life, as I knew it, had changed for good.

Amanda’s face was animated, happy. I realized I wanted it to stay that way. Why? Was it feelings of guilt from a job poorly done more than a decade ago? I’d probably done worse things to more people over the years and I wasn’t hustling to make amends with them. Was it paternal? Misplaced feelings for a kid I’d never had? Maybe. But the real reason was closer at hand. It didn’t take much imagination to wonder what I’d be doing right now, how I would feel, if she hadn’t had the guts to walk up to me

And what became clear to me in that infinite moment is that, ironically, a man with cancer has more options than one that doesn’t. Having already stared my own mortality in the face, I couldn’t really be threatened with death.

Four months from now, on a secluded beach in Turkey, Davis Winger, who came thousands of miles to start over, will drop his towel and paperback on the sand, wade into the sea, and end up under the tire of a Hyundai that has just come screeching over an embankment. He will be trapped under that car, pinned to the seabed with one final breath crowding his lungs. Time enough to lament that his daughter might now grow up without him; that he might never hear words of forgiveness from the woman he adored, and betrayed; that he might not live to build the roller coaster that his six-year-old had dreamed up from a storybook and that he had spent the summer engineering into reality. Constructing that ride, harnessing his daughter’s giddy vision into a set of blueprints, was his best shot at winning back the people he loved and hurt and lost. The promise of redemption was slipping away. All alone and far from home, he’ll reach for the surface as the sea encloses.

That autumn day was coming. But today it was still spring, a mild Saturday in May, and when Davis awakened next to his wife in the charmingly overgrown Baltimore neighborhood of Mount Washington, he was still gainfully employed and still welcome in his own home.

The high school yearbook was basically Davis’s personal photo album, but when Molly graduated three years later, below her photo it read: “Molly Winger—Not Pictured.” And the thing is, she was pictured. Her photo was right there, above the words “Not Pictured.” That was the essence of Molly. Seen yet somehow undetected. There but unaccounted for. Actually, she preferred it that way.

—Well, that was how it felt, he said. —Like we’d never been apart.

—But—.

—I know, he said. —I know. We’d never been much together. But I’m talking about feelings here, not facts. Feelings. The feel of the thing.

It sounded like something he’d said before. More than once.

There is a reason why men don’t talk about their feelings. It’s not just that it’s difficult, or embarrassing. It’s almost impossible. The words aren’t really there

—The drink is funny, though, isn’t it? You see things clearly but then you can’t get at the words to express them properly.

—Or somethin’.

—Or somethin’, yeah.

—It’s a thing abou’ gettin’ older, he said. —At least, I suppose it is. So many memories, you know. It become, harder to separate wha’ happened from wha’ might’ye happened an’ wha’ didn’t happen but kind o’ seemed to.

He was looking at me.

—Is it? he asked.

—Is memory reliable? I said. —Is that wha’ you mean?

—I think so, yeah. yeah.

At dawn, when the sun’s up ove rthe mountains and it hits the far edges of twon at the right angle, the pink caliche on the bluffs burns crimson and everytign runs red. Murfee alwasy wakes up bloody. The dead are her secrets…The missing are her ghosts.

I know who Deputy Cherry found out at Indian Bluffs, and so does my father.

My mother…his missing wife.

“If” he said, and he repeated the word for emphasis, “if I go along with this entirely hare-brained idea, which’ll most likely end up gettin’ us all killed, Jayne’ll be in my debt.”

“That he surely will.”

“And I’ll have this to rub his nose in for months to come.”

“Again, yes.”

Mal crooked one corner of his mouth. “Then what the heck? I’m in. Just tell me this: when did a shipload of criminals, desperadoes, and fugitives become such a bunch of do-gooders?”

Inara had the answer. “When their captain showed them how.”

•  River got to talk to more cows!
•  Shepherd Book’s Christianity was a little more pronounced than I’m used to (and they actually explicitly called it “Christianity”–it was always clear that’s what it was, but no one ever used the C-word in the show/movie)
•  While trying to fly the ship away from the missile, Wash remembered the words of “his Zen Buddhist flight instructor”: You are a leaf on the wind. I almost threw the book away at that point, why do that to me?
•  River defended Serenity using blades and guns—and was (again) the hero of the moment.
•  Wash and Zoë have some great moments together. Zoë has some pretty good moments that have nothing to do with Wash, too.
•  The Chapter titles (one of those things I never pay enough attention to) are even pretty fun: “The Inevitable Bar Brawl” and “Landmines of an Improvised and Somewhat Homespun Nature,” for example.
•  Jayne described talking to River as “a radio and the signal keeps hopping, changing channels at random.” Hard to beat that.