Brit Bennett

“It was strange learning the contours of another’s loneliness. You could never know it all at once; like stepping inside a dark cave, you felt along the walls, bumped into jagged edges.”

“Why should she dress in a cap and gown and sweat in the sun, when her mother was not there to pose in pictures with her and cheer when her name was called? In her mind, she only saw pictures they would never take, arms around each other, her mother gaining little wrinkles around her eyes from smiling so much.”

“She closed her eyes, trying to remember the photos that had hung on the walls. She had passed these pictures every day, but now she only remembered them vaguely--her parents on their wedding day, her mother in a garden, her family at Knott's Berry Farm. How had she not memorized them? Or maybe she had once but she was beginning to forget. Did the house smell different because her mother's scent was gone? Or had she just forgotten how her mother smelled?”