Status Updates From Perfect Summer (The Lone St...

SPOILER?

Perfect Summer. That’s a wonderful name for a rose.

Since I get to name the rose bush, I chose Perfect Summer.

sculpture that looked like a giant Hershey’s Kiss minus the wick

(I understand, even though I’ve never heard or read the Kiss ribbon referred to as a wick.)

While she could appreciate minimalism, she didn’t understand the stark, bare countertops and hidden appliances. It was a sea of nothingness.

Love was real. It wasn’t fireworks and fancy words but finding the one person who got her. Clint knew everything about her and wanted to be with her anyway.

Her mother had a milk mustache and chocolate commas around her mouth.

I’m happy for you. He seems nice.

He is, and he doesn’t let me run all over him.

That was pretty much the best her mother could hope for in a relationship.

Toiletries. I hate that word.

I used to slip it into conversation just to torture her.

Davis looked like a tolerant man who was not only at the end of his rope but ready to wrap it around her mother’s neck and pull it tight.

How can you walk around naked?

What? I’m wearing a hot blonde as a codpiece.

I’d like to volunteer to become the human bra. Good support is very important.

Her mother had definitely turned over a new leaf. Right now, Summer was prepared to take life one leaf at a time until she’d made up her mind on whether her mother had turned over enough new ones to change her family tree.

Since they’re vultures, you should be the big SUV that turns them into road kill.

I’ll take a margarita with Cointreau, Don Julio’s Resposado, and fresh lime juice. Life’s too short to drink cheap tequila.

Leticia, I may be trailer trash, but I have a lot of money. You’d do well to remember that.

Since God gave you maracas, you should show them off.

The maracas comment is very insensitive considerin’ my ethnicity.

First-stringers get most of Atan’s time, so the benchwarmers get mine. Clint hadn’t wanted the practice to be official because he wanted to help the players who needed it.

Here’s the thing, she’s not legal. I am, and my sisters are, but my mother snuck over on fake papers about seventeen years ago.

Your father … was an @$$. He tried to beat the sappy out of you, but the tiniest spark is still there.

Summer was teaching him that he didn’t need to pretend to be someone he wasn’t because he was just fine the way he was.

Love between a mother and daughter might be precarious but it was strong and unconditional.

he would be an excellent coach, not because he was driven to win, but because he saw potential and wanted to draw it out so the athlete would see it too.

“Can I talk about drugs? Talking about the sixties, it’s kind of hard to leave them out.”
~~~~~
“There were lots of drugs. The music scene was filled with them, soldiers were bringing them back from overseas. In my world, they were everywhere.”

Establishment meant a lot of things back then. Government, organized religion, and, well … pretty much anything organized or commercial.

“We went and had one last round on The Pearl. That was her nickname.”

Her mother knew Janis Joplin?

a look passed between them, the kind often shared by long-married couples that telegraphed love, sympathy, and support all in a split second of eye contact

D@mn it, potential will always be my Achilles heel.

I don’t want her to get hurt.

So stop hurtin’ her. She’s a grown-up. Stop interferin’.

She’d been cut out of a Rubens painting and pasted in modern times.

Is it bigger than a bread box?

I don’t know. I’ve never seen a bread box.

Her tongue peanut-buttered to the roof of her mouth …