Phyllis’s Reviews > Hello Beautiful > Status Update

For William's entire life, hed been trying to hold himself together. There was the little boy coughing in his closet, trying not to upset his parents. The unsteady college student…The young man who was relieved to be chosen by a powerhouse of a woman... He’d followed her every instruction, but eventually the directions had led him so far away from himself that he was no longer a person.

For William, [writing] was something he worked on because there was a silence inside him that sometimes frightened him. Basketball was noisy— the game took place at tempo, with ten men jumping, shooting, guarding, cutting at every moment-and writing about it masked William's internal quiet. He could listen to the thumping of the basketball, in the gym or on the page, and imagine that it was his own heartbeat.

Sylvie looked around at the bent heads, her sweating, weeping sis-rs and her rock-faced mother, and knew they were all in trouble. harlie had seen and loved each of them for who they were. When any of his girls-including Rose-had come into view, he'd always given them the same welcome, calling out, “Hello beautiful!” The greeting was nice enough to make them want to leave the room and come in all over again.

When Sylvie looked back on that moment-from the funeral pew, and later…—it would always be one of her great joys that her father had said this …[and] by paraphrasing one of his favorite poems: "We are not contained between our hats and boots." …and the father and daughter had walked home, their arms touching, molecules dancing between them, and the stars turning on like tiny lightbulbs in the evening sky.

Relatives and cousins Sylvie had let only a handful of times because so-and-so hated so-and-so ar-ved and departed in tears or huffs. ... There was an infrastructure of grudges that had shaped Charlie's and Rose's extended families and kept them away from one another. When the Padavano sters thought of family, they'd always pictured only the six people who lived under their roof.

"You need to work on your handle. You know Bill Bradley? That gawky guy on the Knicks? When he was a kid, he taped cardboard to his glasses so he couldn't look down, couldn't see his feet. And then he dribbled up and down the sidewalk wearing those glasses. He looked crazy, no doubt, but his handle got real tight. He has a perfect feel for how the ball will bounce and how to find it without looking."