Grave: A place where the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student.
     -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

...the heart is the beginning of life ... it is the household divinity.
     -- William Harvey, The Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals

For my mother, my best friend.

To my daughter, Elizabeth Hanover Redmond, who allowed me to see it from the other side

The boys down on the Low Quay know a hundred ways to sell bad fish.

Like a dog unaware it was about to be put down, Manda Frank's cottage sat in the long shade of her new house.

"Nothing without labour."

Polly had always marveled, along with Margaret, that her country would name such a processed and unnatural product after itself, yet hungry Rose, with a smile as if remembering the funniest of jokes, gleefully ate every individually wrapped, plastic little one of them.