"That first night in it with Ob and May was as close to paradise as I may ever come in my life. Paradise because these two old people — who never dreamed they’d be bringing a little girl back from their visit with the relatives in Ohio — started, from the minute we pulled up in Ob’s old Valiant, to turn their rusty, falling-down place into a house just meant for a child."
Summer is the protagonist of the novel writing in the first-person and describing how she came to live with her Uncle Ob and Aunt May. This quote occurs early in the novel as Summer is describing the circumstances of her coming to live with these specific relatives in Deep Water, West Virginia. Orphaned at an early age, Summer is passed along from one set of her mother's relatives to the next, never staying put for long, and never managing to develop a deep and loving bond. All this changes when Ob and May come for a visit and, in her own words, recognize "an angel when they saw her." The narrative of this short volume covers the unexpected death of Aunt May and Uncle Ob's spiral into despondency. This state of depressive mourning stimulates an effort to contact the spirit of his dead wife. Until that moment of her demise, Summer enjoys a happy and contented home life she never thought possible after the death of her own mother.
“No. We were led here, and here my looking ends. I can’t go traipsing through the state like some old fool, searching out psychics. I’m not meant to do it and I won’t.”
The bulk of the story is a road trip undertaken by Summer, Uncle Ob, and a somewhat idiosyncratic classmate of Summer's named Cletus Underwood. Cletus has brought to Ob's attention a spiritualist calling herself Reverend Miriam B. Young: Small Medium at Large. The idea behind the road trip is for Rev. Young to act as a medium between Aunt May in the afterlife and the mournfully grieving Uncle Ob. This quote sums up the climax of that intended meeting. Upon arrival, the trio is informed by her nephew that Miriam has also passed onto the next realm. When Uncle Ob expresses this exasperated intention to give up, Summer is convinced that this is the moment he has given up on life himself. She prepares herself for the worst to come on the way back home from the front porch of the late Rev. Young's home.
“She’s still here, honey. People don’t ever leave us for good.”
Summer turns out to be surprised by the direction that Uncle Ob's emotional state takes after leaving that porch in a state of disappointment. The worst that she feared is still to come turns out to have already been behind them. Ob undergoes a strange transformation following the disappointment in seeking out Rev. Young to act as a medium between his mortality and Aunt May's place in the afterlife. Ultimately, the novel is a story of coming to terms with loss and mourning and grief. This quote comes at a place and time in that complicated process at which Uncle Ob has learned to finally let go of his departed wife as she existed in the past and accept her memory as an eternal presence that will never go away.
