Oh William!

Elizabeth Strout

“So William picked up the phone and ordered room service. ‘Two cheeseburgers in room 302’ — his room— he said, and then he said, ‘Two Caesar salads. And a glad of white wine. Any kind. Doesn’t matter.’ He put the phone down and said, ‘Come back to my room, yours is so depressing you could kill yourself in here.’” pg. 153

“And then I saw a man who (I think) was going to spend the night at the airport; he was not old or young, and he had with him many large white plastic bags, not suitcases, and he was alone in a section of the airport where the lights were turned down very low. I thought he saw me looking at him; he stopped eating from a big bag of potato chips he had on his lap.” pg. 102

Clam Chowder: “One time when the girls were young we had to wait a very long time while William finished a huge bowl of steamed clams in a restaurant.” pg. 64

“Another terror: This had to do with Germany and his father, who had died when William was fourteen. His father had come from Germany as a prisoner of war—World War II—and been sent to work on the potato fields in Maine, where he met William’s mother; she was married to the potato farmer.” pg. 11

“And Catherine took them doughnuts she had made one day about a month after the men had first arrived, she took them doughnuts to eat with their lunch out by the potato house; she told the men were not fed enough, and she said that Wilhelm had glanced at her in a way that made her positively shiver.” pg. 58

“We go to the place on the seventh floor where they serve frozen yogurt and then we walk through the store in a desultory fashion. I have written before about doing that with my girls.” pg. 92