cut from the novel 2

Random cuts from Chapter 18:
1. It was two in the afternoon. She was looking at the ceiling, but for variety, she occasionally turned her head to look out the window at the neighbor’s roof, and the slice of sky that showed above it.
2. She didn’t look at Nancy. Her hands hadn’t stopped moving all the time she was talking.
3. She had a skirt, too, but she’d gotten a stain on it on the first night, at dinner with the principal at her old school. A pickled beet landed with a slap on her thigh, and she’d meant to soak it but forgot.
4. There was a box marked “Snapshots” in the corner, and she pulled it out, brushing the dust from the lid. When she opened it, she saw that they were mostly black and white. The one on top showed three people standing in someone’s back yard, two women and a man, dressed for Sunday. She didn’t recognize them. On the back, it said “Dollie and the two goons.”
5. It had been one of Maurice’s lunatic ambitions to build his own fence right up against theirs. But he had never gotten around to it, so there was chain link on the left, a 6-foot boarded privacy fence on the right, and in the back, one of those ancient constructions of wood posts strung with wire in a pattern of squares, overgrown with morning glory. The back fence was the one Maurice hated the most, and Nancy loved best.
6. She swept her eye down the table. “I for one don’t want to dwell on the morbid.”