Chapter 19 Two women in the square on market day. One plays a harp, the other, bells. At their feet a sign says, "Deux femmes de 54 ans essayant de gagner leur vie dans la dignité. Bonne journée et merci à vous." At their feet a little basket for money. The albino midget passes offering…
On the last day of our vacation in Paris, I was thinking that it's better to be content at Our Lady of Perpetual Aluminum Siding than to feel disappointment at Notre-Dame Cathedral. John, sitting beside me during the Spanish-language service, held my hand and stared down at the floor. He looked morose because the day…
Each night when Sandra got in from work, she watched the late movie on TV and ate a cold boiled egg with a Coca-Cola, sometimes with sesame crackers if she remembered to bring a few packets from the restaurant where she had been a hostess for the past two weeks. She had been drifting off…
The night Davis and I told our father we wanted a bomb shelter, I sat in silence at the dinner table, listening for sounds from my mother's bedroom. I watched my father butter his bread. I watched Davis sort through his 3-D cards, whose deep focal views-a fisherman with the Hoover Dam behind him, a…
When Burns arrived in Kotzebue, they were shooting the dogs. He'd never been to Alaska before and it seemed without compromise. Weather had kept him in Nome for two days where he'd seen a saloon fire. He'd been across the street in a shop buying chocolate and bottled water, and the eerie frozen scene mesmerized…
The Bighorns float above the haze to the west of our ranch like marble palaces in a fairy tale. Until the woman came, we'd never been up in those mountains. My father kept us to work day after day, or else there was school, and, until the woman, he'd said he couldn't leave the ranch…
Monday her car wouldn't start and Anita spent all day renting-a-wreck and driving like crazy to the hospital two hours away, and at five she arrived, and at five her father wasn't dead. (It was the carburetor, she found out later.) At five Anita's father was only dying: a man so pumped with fluid he'd…
The first noises had all been dings, mostly, or thuds, but these new noises were all real rumbles and in the walls. Other numbles had come and gone, but they had been lower down, deeper, beneath her-some midnight demon under the bed that had gone away with warm milk or with tea, a runaway train…
Their plans were to develop the valley, and my plans were to stop them. I was caretaking this ranch in Montana that the two of them had bought, or were buying. One of them was an alcoholic and the other was a realtor. The alcoholic-the big one-was from New York and did something on the…
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