Osby wasn't considered the smartest man in Eads County. But the no one . . . knew him well enough to realize that he wasn't all that far from it either.

My belief is you have one chance to make a first impression.

I just don't give off a great first impression.

Ginny who lived her life with hair in the breeze, Stillman who lived his with it under his hat. And he loved her so much the worse for it.

All was still: dark crawlers with their frozen treads, bulldozers motionless as boulders, backhoes with bent necks and sleeping hearts and shove-mouth jaws pillowed on gravel. And tractors. An antique Case Model DEX in signature flambeau red, last year's twenty-foot-tall New Holland TV140 gleaming like a groomed thoroughbred, Minneapolis-Molines and John Deeres and Steigers and Fords and still, among them all, nothing quite like the Deutz.

I grew up on Raffi. That was my first impression of what a rock star was.