Characters in Mute

Still, he started slowly, as so many confessors do. “I’m married,” he said. “I’m fifty-five and my wife is fifty-four.” He considered this while the windshield wipers ticked back and forth. “Fifty-four, Barbara’s fifty-four. We’ve been married twenty-six years. One kid. A daughter. A lovely daughter. Kelsie Ann.

A lovely daughter. Kelsie Ann. She goes to school in Cleveland, and I don’t know how I’m going to keep her there, because two weeks ago, with no warning, my wife turned into Mount St. Helens. Turns out she’s got a boyfriend. Has had a boyfriend for almost two years.

Colored light came in through the windows and made squares on the central aisle. Monette thought about leaving and didn’t. Instead he walked to the booth that was open for business and went inside. When he closed the door and sat down, the little slider on his right opened.

Or vomiting there. “She’s fifty-four,” he said. “That’s what I can’t get over. It means she started up with this guy, whose real name is Robert Yandowsky—how’s that for a cowboy name—when she was fifty-two. Fifty-two! Would you say that’s old enough to know better, my friend?

They think they know who the guy is. They’re familiar with the sign. His name is Stanley Doucette. He’s spent years rambling around New England with that sign of his. Sort of like me, now that I think of it.” “Prior crimes of violence on his record?”

We’ve had the district superintendent and his wife over to the house for dinner, and of course I saw him at all the end-of-school-year picnics, usually at the Dowrie Country Club. Victor McCrea. University of Maine graduate. Played football. Majored in phys ed. Crew cut.