Fiction

The day after Thanksgiving my mother was arrested outside the front doors of the J.C. Penney's, Los Angeles, and when I went to get her I considered leaving her at the security desk. I thought I wanted her in jail. I wasn't surprised – I'd known all along she was a thief. Small things: a…

He wanted, above all, to crack The New Yorker. He could not deal in the right things, a lorgnette, an Italian garden, a grandmother, Mexico. Mexico is perfect because it is a proximate paradise. Situations come undone without the vexation that Europe can sometimes bring. The New Yorker watches for mise en scene. You feel…

It was one of those pearl-soft days when the sky drifts in broken ridges of gray. I was on my way up the coast, planning to winter over in one of the waterfront towns on the eastern shore of Vancouver Island. It was mid-November. I had been out since early spring. I hoped to find…

The woman across the street bends over to pull a weed from her front steps. I set a fresh cup of coffee on the Help Wanted section and watch from my second-story kitchen window. She is married to a surgeon. It's a two-Mercedes family. She and the surgeon have two daughters. One married a lawyer…

1. Crazy? It’s after midnight, and I kiss my wife’s cheek and quietly slide out of bed: No lights, no alarm. Blue jeans and work boots and a flannel shirt, then out to the backyard. I pick a spot near the toolshed. Crazy, you think? Maybe, maybe not, but listen. This is the hour of…

There was a park at the bottom of the hill. Now that the leaves were down Marty could see the exercise stations and part of a tennis court from her kitchen window, through a web of black branches. She took another donut from the box on the table and ate it slowly, watching the people…

In my family, there were always two people. First, my mother and father. Carol and John. They danced. Hundreds of evenings at hundreds of parties in their twenties. A thousand times between songs her eyes completely closed when she leaned against him. He looked down at the top of her head; her part gleamed white,…

It is a soft afternoon. Spring. Blue and pale green. Just a little breeze occasionally laces the silvery warmth of the sun. They are in the yard at the back of the house, standing on the graveled drive that divides the lawn and her flower beds from the working yard of packed dirt and rough…

Her grandmother would put on her glasses to read labels when the girl went to the market with her. The grandmother would read the brand name and the price out loud to the girl. The girl could not read much herself, but sometimes she pretended she could. The grandmother would read a word, and the…