How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Our home fell apart when she left. She was our center of gravity, the only one of us who saw life as a controllable project. Carlo was an orphan like me. We forgot all about the jade plants, they went crisp as potato chips out on the porch, and Carlo withered as if he needed water also. (2.10)
So, Carlo is a plant, and Loyd is an animal. This explains so much, since Codi is an animal-lover, and it's her sister who's the plant.
Quote #2
And somehow Hallie thrived anyway—the blossom of our family, like one of those miraculous fruit trees that taps into an invisible vein of nurture and bears radiant bushels of plums while the trees around it merely go on living. In Grace, in the old days when people found one of those in their orchard they called it the semilla besada—the seed that got kissed. Sometimes you'd run across one that people had come to, and returned to, in homes of a blessing. The branches would be festooned like a Christmas tree of family tokens: a baby sock, a pair of broken reading glasses, the window envelope of a pension check. (5.102)
This is that tricky kind of foreshadowing when it looks good things are coming until you get to the part about the Day of the All Souls and realize that the graves are decorated in the same way the trees are. Yay, Hallie is a tree. Wait, Hallie is a grave? Uh oh.
Quote #3
Emelina was up with the chickens. I heard her outside in the courtyard pulling honeysuckle vines away from the old brick barbecue with a peculiar zipping sound, like threads from a seam in rotten cloth. (7.1)
The general fecundity of Emelina's garden—from the honeysuckle-covered barbecue to the plants and flowers and the goats and hummingbirds that roam around it—works as a symbol that's opposed to Carlo's dead houseplants. Emelina can nurture anything or anyone, even Codi. Carlo? Not so much.