The fact that Susie's mom takes a break from her family and moves to California gave her a chance to get over Susie's death and come back as a better person. Susie’s mom is torn up over Susie's death like everyone else and she makes rash decisions to try to forcefully push the pain away. One of the decisions she makes is to cheat on her husband with the detective of her daughter's murder, Len. But she doesn’t do this out of love, her main driving force is instead to distract herself from reality. This can be noticed through what Susie sees, “My mother was moving physically through time to flee from me.” (152) and “I knew what was happening. Her rage. Her loss. Het despair. The whole life lost tumbling out in an arc on that roof, clogging up her being. …show more content…
She wants to be able to have time to move on. This can be seen during a ceremony for
In the high criminal neighborhood where the other Wes lived, people who live there need a positive role model or a mentor to lead them to a better future. Usually the older family members are the person they can look up to. The other Wes’s mother was not there when the other Wes felt perplexed about his future and needed her to support and give him advises. Even though the other Wes’s mother moved around and tried to keep the other Wes from bad influences in the neighborhood, still, the other Wes dropped out of school and ended up in the prison. While the author Wes went to the private school every day with his friend Justin; the other Wes tried to skip school with his friend Woody. Moore says, “Wes had no intention of going to school. He was supposed to meet Woody later – they were going to skip school with some friends, stay at Wes’s house, and have a cookout” (59). This example shows that at the time the other Wes was not interested in school. Because Mary was busy at work, trying to support her son’s education, she had no time and energy to look after the other Wes. For this reason, she did not know how the other Wes was doing at school and had no idea that he was escaping school. She missed the opportunities to intervene in her son’s life and put him on the right track. Moreover, when the author was in the military school, the other Wes was dealing drugs to people in the streets and was already the father of a child. The incident that made the other Wes drop out of school was when he had a conflict with a guy. The other Wes was dating with the girl without knowing that she had a boyfriend. One night, her boyfriend found out her relationship with the other Wes and had a fight with him. During the fight, the other Wes chased the guy and shot him. The guy was injured and the other Wes was arrested
It is never told exactly what has caused Lisa Shilling to slip into this state of depression, which helps to make the atmosphere of the novel very mysterious. Just when it appears that Lisa is getting better, another episode occurs. The story is disturbing, being set around Lisa’s school and home. With other characters in the story, such as Lisa’s parents, causing conflicts with Lisa receiving proper treatment, the story is given a disturbing yet realistic feel.
Torey always wondered how and where Sheila was, so just before her 14th birthday, Torey located Sheila and went to see her. She was living in a small house with her father who had supposedly gave up alcohol and drugs. Their reunion was akward for both of them and not quite what Torey had been expecting. Torey had been assuming that Sheila would be just like she had left her seven years ago. However, instead she had wild clothing and blazing yellow straggly hair. After the first visit, Torey made frequent visits to see Sheila in hopes that they could rebuild their friendship. They went to the movies, shopping, out to dinner, and many other things like that. When summer began, Torey asked her if she'd like to help out in a summer school program with herself, her friend Jeff, and a teaching aide, Miriam. This worked out well. She was able to work with children with many various disabilities. She befriended a young boy who had been adopted from Columbia. He didn't talk and was...
She says that she has been blessed to not have to go to many funerals in her lifetime yet, but the ones that she has been to have been mostly for supporting the family while they’re suffering and to remember the person’s life.
...o start a new life. The freedom that she desired has been achieved and there is hope for a happier marriage after all.
to discover how she has lost the ability to feel, ands the unraveling of her own mystery
Looking back on the death of Larissa’s son, Zebedee Breeze, Lorraine examines Larissa’s response to the passing of her child. Lorraine says, “I never saw her cry that day or any other. She never mentioned her sons.” (Senior 311). This statement from Lorraine shows how even though Larissa was devastated by the news of her son’s passing, she had to keep going. Women in Larissa’s position did not have the luxury of stopping everything to grieve. While someone in Lorraine’s position could take time to grieve and recover from the loss of a loved one, Larissa was expected to keep working despite the grief she felt. One of the saddest things about Zebedee’s passing, was that Larissa had to leave him and was not able to stay with her family because she had to take care of other families. Not only did Larissa have the strength to move on and keep working after her son’s passing, Larissa and other women like her also had no choice but to leave their families in order to find a way to support them. As a child, Lorraine did not understand the strength Larissa must have had to leave her family to take care of someone else’s
Using the murder of Dee Ann’s mother as a means to intertwine the lives of the characters together, Steve Yarbrough examines the nature of relationships in “The Rest of Her Life.” The relationships in the story take a turn after Dee Ann’s mother is killed, with characters seeking to act more on their own, creating distance between many relationships throughout the story. Independent lifestyles prevent emotional bonds that hold relationships together from forming, thus preventing the characters from maintaining healthy relationships. The dysfunctional relationship present between Dee Ann and Chuckie in “The Rest of Her Life” is the result of the characters ' desire for self-gratification.
The story begins with Mama, and her daughter, Maggie, waiting in their yard for a visit from Dee. Walker uses the setting of the story to allow the reader to fully grasp the financial hardships that the family has had to bear. The house is described as having “three rooms, there are no real windows, just some holes cut in the sides, like the portholes in a ship, but not round and not square, with rawhide holding the shutters up on the outside” (Baym and Levine 1531). Dee is the daughter who couldn’t wait to leave home. In fact, she hated the house she grew up in. When it caught on fire many years ago, Mama wanted to ask her “Why don’t you do a dance around the ashes? She had hated the house that much” (Baym and Levine 1532). Dee’s family raised enough money for her to go to school and, as she moved away and became more educated, she lost sight of where she came from. Mama is not just waiting on her daughter to arrive but also wondering if she will be accepted by her. Her daughter is the complete opposite of her, and Mama sometimes dreams that “I am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake. My hair glistens in the hot bright lights” (Baym and Levine 1531). Mama is a practical woman though and knows this is not the way things are. The reader realizes this when
she wanted to see true love one more time, she wanted a love story to
With all the recent events that have occurred in Mabel’s life she truly believes that this is the end for herself; “mindless and persistent, she seemed in a sort of ecstasy to be coming nearer to her fulfillment, her own glorification, approaching her dead mother, who was glorified” (Lawrence 705). Mabel walks down to the cemetery where her mother lays at rest because Mabel is feeling alone and wants that sense of security. Mabel’s depression causes her to believe that “the life she follow[s] here in the world was far less real than the world of death she inherited from her mother” (Lawrence 706). All of these dark thoughts and memories of a life with her mother running through Mabel’s head lead to her finally giving up on her life and walking into a dreary pond to try to drown herself and end her life.
to get married as soon as possible before she was too old to do so.
to be in that place. She wants him to be happy and in giving him that
Gina Montgomery has been a single mom so long, she's forgotten she's a woman -- until a romantic hero straight out of her dreams strolls into her life, awakening desire and lust. The cowboy surprises her at every turn. When she freaks out about a spider, he calmly carries it outside. When her dishwasher breaks, he fixes it. She won't let just any man into her life -- as a single mom, she just can't risk it -- but Aidan is different and she feels a thrill of excitement every time she's around him.
It started as a normal Monday morning; Emily crawled out of bed attempting not to wake her mother. She grabbed the tethered clothing that she had worn the day previously and began to dress. Every move she made seemed to echo the floor with creaks from the wood. She walked into the kitchen as if walking on red hot ash to make her mother coffee trying to avoid the usual routine beatings. Emily rushed out the door as she heard rustling coming from her mother’s room. She walked to the bus stop noticing the old, deteriorating houses with trash in the yards.