Fiction

Peter had always been more than thoughtful in not pressing her about her past, and Beatrice was sure it was a reason for her choice of him. Most men, coming of age in a time that extolled openness and disclosure, would have thought themselves remiss in questioning her so little. Perhaps because he was a…

S andalwood, Jaime whispers to himself, recalling the vendor who had sold Tony and him the three little vials of this scented oil and the five foil packets of incense. He had a makeshift stall outside the bus terminal in Dudley Square. Wearing an embroidered red and black tarboosh and an immaculately white T-shirt, on…

from The Farewell Symphony   Tomorrow is Toussaint in Paris, All Saint’s Day, and I suppose I’ll visit Brice’s little white marble plaque in the columbarium at Père Lachaise. Why do I avoid it for months on end? I keep thinking of a couple of Americans we met during the year before Brice died. One…

For more than a year, I thought Roman had disappeared from my life. If not for our very adequate postal service, he might have, but the last week of August, I open the mailbox to find an envelope that has been stamped: Moved No Forwarding Address, with an arrow drawn to the return address, tiny…

We were sipping grappa, watching The Tragic Stiletto of Trabzon on an old Zenith TV in a suburban public square outside of Patras. Though it was dusk, and the images were murky, the film looked familiar, like a dim photo resolving in its pan. My wife and I were trying to read the lips of…

How do you begin to judge your father? The Coast Guard and the insurance company investigators would list my father as blameless in the boating death of Lamar Locklear, our next-door neighbor and my father’s business partner. The boat-a sportsfisher-was christened the Nell, a name my divorced parents had chosen for me had I been…

The calm, early-summer afternoon that “in the flash of a moment would be shattered by gunfire”-the newspaper writer expressed it this way-had been unremarkable for the Blakelys: like the other “returning commuters” (the newspaper writer again), they were sitting in traffic, in the heat, with jazz playing on the radio, saying little to each other,…

Where did I get the idea for this picture? It was the year of El Niño-the current, I mean, and not anything else that I knew about at the time-and the meteorologists were telling us to expect strange events in the atmosphere. They didn’t say anything about events at home, where it hadn’t been good…

The man at her door was bald and wore a blue windbreaker. She had asked him twice what he wanted, but he had only said, “Are you Emily Fletcher?” as if he knew she was, but needed confirmation. It struck her from the man’s salutary tone that she might have won something-an envelope was about…