Villages , by John Updike

"Skip Potteiger got Mary Lou Brumbach next door pregnant when she was only seventeen but then he married her so it was all right—by D-Day the baby was in a carriage that Mary Lou pushed back and forth on her way to the Acme, over the shallow troughs that carried roof water out to the gutter and the sidewalk squares that the roots of the horse-chestnut trees were tilting up, tripping you if you were on roller skates." —from Villages, by John Updike (Knopf)

It's an ideal evocation of the mundane, this sentence, from the pregnancy made "all right" by the wedding (a childish concept, except that the town, too, not just the boy from whose point of view the sentence is written, would think the issue so simply resolved and use that very term) to the trips to the grocery store—its name a word ...