Word: laurell
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Father and daughter have both long been widowed, but at 70 the old man is sanguine enough to marry Fay, a redneck trollop 30 years his junior, and introduce her into genteel circles. Fay is in every way Laurel's opposite-a shrewd, stupid vixen with a "little feist chin" who questions any altruistic gesture made to her, not out of skepticism but simple inability to comprehend...
...Judge dies in New Orleans while apparently recuperating from an operation. Fay and Laurel bring the body back to the old family house, where Laurel grew up and where all of Mount Salus gathers to "tell the Judge goodbye." Finally, Laurel is left for a time in a house that is now Fay's trying to sort out what really happened there in the past...
...that seems obscene to Laurel, the presence of death had broken their harmony long before her mother died...
Before returning to her own home in Chicago, Laurel burns her father's letters to Becky and takes no keepsakes...
...travel with is the memory of her parents' love and her own love for them - and the knowledge that even such a trinity is insufficient in the face of suffering and death. The book ends quietly. All her ex-bridesmaids reassemble to see Laurel off. Some first-graders wave goodbye from their schoolyard...