Even on their wedding day, John and Irene sensed that they were about to make a mistake. Years later, divorced, dating other people, and living in different parts of the country, they seem to have nothing in common -- nothing except the most important person in each of their lives: Sadie, their spirited eighteen-year-old daughter. Feeling smothered by Irene and distanced from John, Sadie is growing more and more attached to her new boyfriend, Ron....

"This beautiful novel tells the love story of young Arthur Moses and Nola, and how a young man grew up to become the wise old man known as Arthur trulove. Set in the 1950s in the warm community of Mason, Missouri, Arthur is a shy, unathletic teenage boy, in love with the most beautiful girl in his class. He is thrilled when they become friends, but he wants more than friendship. Alas, he learns that Nola has a crush on the wrong Moses--Arthur's older...

Fifty-four-year-old Laura Bartone, the happily married mother of two, is looking forward to her annual family reunion in Minnesota. But her vacation plans are marred when her father is felled by a stroke, and her sister, Caroline, at the urging of a therapist, confronts Laura and her brother with disturbing information about her relationship with their mother. As she details the verbal and physical abuse she was subjected to, Laura and her brother...

As a student nurse, Paige Dunn once took care of Elvis Presley's mother in Tupelo, MS. She contracted polio while pregnant with her daughter and is paralyzed from the neck down. Deserted by her husband and on welfare, Paige relies on Peacie, her black daytime caregiver, and on her daughter, Diana, now 13, for help at night. The teen is devoted to her beautiful, talented mother, yet at times is resentful that her mother's needs must come before her...