"Lady, do I look like a bleeping babysitter?" "He nearly died." "Yeah, because he's a fool. There's no known cure for that." (Chapter 6) - Carl Hiaasen

Chub's real name was Onus Dean Gillespie. The youngest of seven children, he was born to Moira Gillespie when she was forty-seven, her maternal stirrings long dormant. Onus's father, Greve, was a blunt-spoken man who regularly reminded the boy that the arc of his life had begun with a faulty diaphragm, and that his appearance in Mrs. Gillespie's womb had been as welcome as "a cockroach on a wedding cake." Still, Onus was neither beaten nor deprived as a child. Greve Gillespie made good money as a timber man in northern Georgia and was generous with his family. They lived in a large house with a basketball hoop in the driveway, a second-hand ski boat in the garage, and a deluxe set of World Book encyclopedias in the basement. All of Onus's siblings made it to Georgia State University, and Onus himself could have gone there too, had he not by age fifteen chosen a life of sloth, inebriation and illiteracy. (Chapter 7)

At the stroke of eleven on a cool April night, a woman named Joey Perrone went overboard from a luxury deck of the cruise liner M.V. Sun Duchess. Plunging toward the dark Atlantic, Joey was too dumbfounded to panic. I married an asshole, she thought, knifing headfirst into the waves. (Chapter 1)

Mockingbird sometimes found it hard to believe this was the same man she'd married. He looked like a different person now, as if someone had put a fire hose up his ass and inflated him with meringue. His ego seemed to have swollen proportionately. It wasn't that long ago when she'd fallen hard for him. Now he was a raging, gaseous oaf. Gone was any trace of the sly charm and tenderness. In their early years, he could actually laugh at himself, but Mockingbird couldn't recall the last time she'd seen an honest smile on his face. (Chapter 17)