Lulu is a breezy woman, laughs and goes through life with less on her mind than most. She ends up having many kids with many men, has 8 sons who helps her around. She is clean, and she keeps her youth, and her pride is always in tact even though the whole town talks. I mean, imagine having a whole tribe of boys who look different from one another. The thing about Lulu Lamartine was that she was just trying to get love right, and it was Nector who dropped her heart like that first.

She marries three times, and later in life after her second marriage Nector does come back to her. She has watched him from afar, but she couldn't do anything since he had a wife and kids. Marie does love him so. But Nector and Lulubump into each other one day because he was transporting butter and his cooling car breaks down and she has a car with AC. He talks awkwardly to her and she says nothing really for a while. In the novel you don't really understand the backstory yet. But anyways then they have a romance on top of the hill with the butter. That's the thing about this book, I've never been so drawn in such romantic sexual scenes before. She's explicit with all her metaphors. It's the butter, really, that got me.

Anyways, he goes home that day to Marie and she's waiting for him. He explains what happened with the car breaking down, that's why he's so late because all those butter shipments. Marie asks him, so where's our butter? He forgot it at Lulu's car. She slams the catalog down, you forgot.

I guess this book showed me just how stupid men really are. I mean he's just been bumping into things his whole life.

He starts sneaking to Lulu's every week. He climbs through her window and it's a secret for five years. Then Lulu drops that she's going to marry Beverly Lamartine, her ex husband's brother. And he gets angry. He wants to kill Bev, or Lulu his eyes said it. He felt truly mad. He finally decides to write a letter to Marie, tell Marie that he's in love with Lulu Lamartine and that he's leaving her. True love is what he said. He writes a letter to Lulu too, a letter telling him that he's ready to marry her and leave his life.

He slides Marie's letter under the sugar at the table. He goes to Lulu's with his newfound confidence. Men are like animals, you just have to press the right buttons, and I guess jealousy is that one button that got him. So he's banging at the door with his letter in his fist and no one is home. He's waiting and waiting, he's never been there at the day time so he doesn't really know Lulu's schedule. He gets mad from waiting. Incredulous! He crumples up the letter and throws the cigarette down, and the letter lights on fire and the dry grass lights on fire and next thing you know the whole house is being swallowed.

Then, behind him, his daughter Zelda emerges and says "Daddy, let's go home." She was the one who found the letter first and showed her mother.

He goes back home and Marie had slid the letter under the salt just to keep him wondering for the rest of his life. Salt or sugar? Class act honestly.

He doesn't go back to Lulu.

Can you imagine, poor Lulu! How she feels? She had to go back and save her baby and it singed off all her hair! She just loved this guy and he did what? Burned her house down and left her with no communication. He was also just trying to tell her he loved her but it came out as this disrespectful slime. He's just a child who wants his candy when he wants it. Too scared to do do anything really. Brave enough only to sneak into her window at night.

Years pass and now Nector is losing his memory. Dementia of some sorts probably and one of his issues is that he keeps calling out for Lulu. Imagine Marie's sorrow! Those dying years. Lipsha, one of Marie's boys she raised out of her good will wanted to help. He knew how it broke her, and he said, okay I'll make a love medicine and Marie agrees to it.

I won't get into details about what the initial idea is, because it's so good and I hope whoever reads this one day actually goes read the book. But long story short Lipsha took a shortcut with it and in the end he presents two turkey hearts from the super market to Grandma and Grandpa. Marie eats it raw and Nector even in his losing mind starts to question it. He said he didn't want to eat it. Marie gets frustrated, why? Not good enough for you? All this food I make for you? Do you need salt?

She kind of forces him to eat it and he begins to choke. And that is how Nector Kashpaw dies.

The thing about this book, if you haven't caught on already, is that everything is part of the myth-making. There is no image that isn't important. And so they mourn and LIpsha is wracked by guilt. Finally he confesses to Marie about the medicine, about how he made it and he says the truth. The truth is Nector did love you, he said to Marie, he understood you, he loved you.

And I think now, I understand that we just want to make sure that those that love us love us. That this certainty doesn't rest on anything really. Like he says he loves Lulu but he always stayed by Marie. Lulu never even knew.

In the end at the Seniors Citizen home Marie and Lulu become best friends. There's care for each other there. Perhaps because they both grieved and loved the same man.

I think now how complex love can become. How we all just crave something simple and pure. But life gets in the way.The thing I finally understand after this book is how serious the matter of love is. How it is a battle, how there is nothing more serious than love. How we go to our wits end for love and that's the point of life. How there is a real frontier and it's the rib cage, pointed and bony and we need to figure out how we want to place our knives and our energy so that we can nourish our own hearts.

We don't get taught that, you know. The seriousness of love. Perhaps it's because there's so much sanitation in most people's lives. Or at least that's what it seems like when you're not inside it. Things look like what they look like. But the truth is love is something to experience and never to be learned. Love is always changing.

At every point in their lives, Nector Marie and Lulu their relationships were always changing. But it's always there.

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