O’Dooley’s was the place where men told jokes. I’d just turned eleven when Dad started taking me there after swim class, my towel-dried hair dribbling water over the thick green carpet as we made our way to the bar. I didn’t shower after class and the chlorine made my skin itch, but I didn’t tell …
The morning of the test, I arrived at the dive shop before the first minibus from Inhambane reached the market bearing the day’s supply of rolls. On the concrete deck, in the half dark, I stood shivering and scanning the profiles of my charges. Late September marked the tail end of winter, dry and cool, …
Night after night as I lay awake in my cell, I found myself thinking of Shaylene. Of course I’d been with other women, was even hitched for a drunken lapse of ninety-two days, but I only ever missed Shaylene, my first everything. I would fantasize about going back to Dothan, showing up at her door …
The home inspector was fifteen minutes late for the appointment but didn’t apologize when he arrived. Behind his smudged glasses, his dark eyes were furtive, his face closed off. “You ready?” he asked, glancing at Jim, who’d been waiting for him on the porch. “Let’s get a move on.” His hand was already reaching for …
“He has also set eternity in the human heart.” ~Ecclesiastes 3:11 THE HOARD It became clear that time was against me. That mortality was always slinking around. That our three children, now almost grown, shouldn’t have to dispose of their dad’s, my husband’s, vast piles of stuff after we died. And that a 3,800-square-foot house …
One afternoon when I might’ve been thirteen years old my father came home in his paint-splattered truck, more than intent. He limp-stomped inside the house—this was summer, and I sat at the kitchen table drinking Kool-Aid sloppily so as to dye my upper lip red—and he jerked his thumb toward the door. I looked up …
Around one he completed the walkthroughs and hung the clipboard on the screw threaded incompletely into the cinderblock wall. The snow was melting as it fell, sleeting out of the sky in globs that streaked slowly down the windows. No one had been in since the woman with the stumbling, half-awake boy who complained loudly …
Two days ago, Renata made herself a promise: she would either fall in love again or kill herself. The day after that, she’d went to a garden center and bought granite bricks, pale and perfect for lining a garden path. Renata filled up a backpack, drank a bottle of cabernet sauvignon, and looked at the …
Don’s divorce had been mostly fine, their sons were well into adulthood, Jeff up in Vancouver as a fundraiser for a First Peoples museum and Mark, naturally, down in Seattle where the money was, making money, and Allison had wanted for so long to be somebody else, to assemble all the parts she had over …
Just after breakfast, we received word that Mr. Noyes and Mrs. Cragin had arrived and that they wished to meet with all the girls, so the other nurses and I gathered up the lot of them, ran combs through their hair, and arranged them in a semicircle on the damp lawn near where Mr. Noyes …